As of late, The History Channel has been putting out a documentary series called “The Universe.” I was recently given a copy of the Blu-ray of season two. Having not watched any of the series thus far, I was pretty excited to give it a watch, as I’m incredibly interested in the universe, and have been watching Carl Sagan’s documentary called Cosmos recently. (Which I highly recommend. You can watch the whole series here!)

As with almost any documentary, I find it really hard to complain about them, as long as you’re learning something in the process of watching them. And with that, I think The Universe was successful. But I think watching it while watching Carl Sagan’s documentary, Cosmos, skewed my opinion of The Universe. I did learn things from watching The Universe, and many of the same things I learned by watching Cosmos. The biggest difference was that Cosmos felt much thicker, and filled with answers which it delivered efficiently, whereas The Universe felt to be flashy, meandering, and even though it was made thirty years later, filled with more questions and suppositions. Also, The Universe seemed to stay away from philosophical questions in general. I think science and religion thoroughly clash, and it’s a shame that they left this subject completely out of it. (As a self aware robot, I am very passionate about this.)

I would hate to sound like I’m not recommending this documentary to anyone, or dissuading anyone from purchasing this product. Far from it, The information they are sharing is much more up to date then any other documentary on the subject I’ve ever seen. While watching the Cosmos, I kept asking myself whether there would be more I could find out, and indeed this documentary told me more.

My biggest problem is with the format which I’ve heard is a common problem with many History Channel documentaries. They try to spice up the information like the ten o’clock news. The first episode of The Universe I watched had a female astronomer strip down to a bra, and begin fire-belly dancing. Then there’s the commercial breaks that always end with “what’s up next!” or, “Is this the end of life as we know it?”

Now I’m not suggesting that I would prefer to be bored out of my mind, I just want to facts delivered efficiently. There is a lot of good information in this documentary series, it all seems up to date, and best of all, I bet I could get a five year old to sit through it. All for a really decent price I might add, even the Blu-ray is affordable.

It seems to me that most of the images in this series are CG, and so I don’t think it would be a big waste to wait for the Blu-ray, but I don’t think you would be missing much if you went ahead and bought it on DVD. It does look nice in high definition though. You can buy the Blu-ray by clicking this week.

In retrospect, if you are interested in the universe this is a good way to get some up to date information about it, and it’s worth buying for that alone. If you have kids that want to learn about the universe, I would also recommend this, but in either case I would watch Cosmos first. That show is great!