It's promising so far, but the ratio of flash to substance was a little high for me, and some of the astronomical depictions were too inaccurate (like the ridiculous cliche of the asteroid belt as a dense Empire Strikes Back-style clutter). As for the rushed pacing and somewhat superficial coverage, the first episode of the original Cosmos did something similar, presenting an overview or thesis statement of the series as a whole and then delving more deeply into specific topics in subsequent weeks. Hopefully the same will be true here. But I suppose a faster pace is only to be expected if the series is to appeal to a modern audience, let alone one watching commercial television.
Tyson was a pretty good presenter -- not quite as lyrical and soulful as Sagan, but effective and polished, and with a marginally similar vocal timbre to Sagan's. And that bit at the end about how Sagan inspired him helps establish his bona fides as Sagan's successor.
There are things I miss from the original series. It's hard to imagine Cosmos without Vangelis's music. Alan Silvestri's score is grand enough but kind of conventional, without as much personality as the original's mix of stock cues ranging from electronic music to classical symphonies to traditional folk songs.
And very, very little of what we saw was real. The original had terrific effects for its day, but it also spent a lot of time showing us real people and places and objects, and that gave it more of a sense of presence and tangibility. This was mostly CGI and cartoons and a guy on a greenscreen stage, and I'm concerned that might make it less relatable.
Still, it did a good job establishing the mission statement: that science is about questioning assumptions and beliefs, building models, and accepting or rejecting them based on the evidence rather than tradition or preconceptions, and that using that method has revealed profound truths that we had no inkling of before. (Although I think it was a little Eurocentric here and there -- Copernicus wasn't the first person to conceive of heliocentrism, but was preceded by Aristarchus and various medieval Muslim scholars. Copernicus was just the first to embrace and develop the idea fully.) And I could see the political subtext in the Giordano Bruno story -- allegory for how reactionary and fundamentalist thinking in America today is threatening the freedom of scientific thought and education.
The use of animation for historical narratives was an interesting addition to the repertoire of Cosmos, but I felt it got a bit too reliant on dramatization and dialogue rather than a narrator's summary. As with some of the space VFX, there were times when it threatened to undermine plausibility and factual accuracy a bit too much in the name of dramatic effect. But for the most part it worked pretty well, although I'm not a big fan of Flash animation and the way things move in it.
The really surprising thing to me was that Brannon Braga was credited not merely as an executive producer, but the director of the episode and one of the series directors. I've never known him to direct before, and as of this writing he has no director credits on IMDb.
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