Curiosity

Oh, wow ... this show is BAD. The material presented is not that new, but much (most?) of it is presented as if it is a stunning new discovery. The filmography is horrible. I can't stand the shaking camera, the constant out-of-focus shots, and the panning-out-of-focus-extreme-closeup shots. I had to just listen to the show and ignore the video portion in order to make it through the episode. I imagine someone is trying to make a name for themselves, trying to get away from the "standard, boring" style of most documentaries. But it was so constantly distracting that I lowered my rating from 5 to 2.

I have been an involuntary witness to the decline of Discovery Channel's level for the last five years. The network used to offer a wide range of educational programs and would often enlighten the viewer. Now, in order to attract a wider audience, they decided to cut knowledge into fine slices, get rid of half and spread the other sliced half all throughout an episode. What you get is repetitiveness and a strange effect that makes the viewer (who was around before the meltdown) feel like a total jackass for being spoonfed individual facts that -together- make up one scientific theory (merely skimmed on the surface by lack of depth). So, Curiosity is NOT what you're looking for if you know anything about any subject they were able to come up with. The drugs episode had me convinced: nothing new there. The one about the universe ... well... resort to Stephen Hawking's Into the Universe (2010) if you feel like being taught something genuine and worth knowing. Curiosity is for those who are new to Discovery Channel's new attitude towards science and television in general. If you know nothing, consider this Class 101 and the teacher knows almost as much as you do.

The only thing that is amusing, is that different celebrities host different episodes. Listening to Morgan Freeman's voice was quite soothing. So that's why I gave this 5/10 instead of 4/10.

Apart from one or two episodes this documentary is very very poor. It seems to be targeted at the American audience as it kind of implies that America is "The World". Regardless of this it has very few factual information and is mostly fictional.

The Titanic episode is one of the most disappointing. It supposedly uses real testimonies but they don't support it with actual evidence like pictures of the actual structures or of the records themselves, so you kinda get that feeling that most of it is made up. The aliens episode is just a bad Sci-fi movie while the cavemen double-episode is basically a bad reality show.

In the end... The only real good episode is the first one but if you compare it to "Through the Wormhole" its not nearly as good... We'll I guess the one about America is kinda decent too and the one about sex as a few interesting facts but they still feel like they were made for dummies.

If you are looking for a documentary or anything to improve your knowledge - stay away from this show. After the first episode (which was narrated by Stephen Hawking) it seemed as if it wasn't THAT bad, even tough the information was spread rather thinly (as someone mentioned here before), but going into episode two you're going to be overwhelmed with crazy assumptions that bare no connection to reality at all. Rule of thumb: a show that is presented by a person who seems to wander aimlessly through a mysterious room while the camera changes its angle every half second usually is just as bad as those sequences tend to look.

If you like Trash TV, just go right ahead - but please: don't believe anything you hear here without checking the facts.