Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The End Is Nye’ On Peacock, Where Bill Nye Explains End Of World Scenarios And How We Can Avoid Them

Can you believe Bill Nye has been on our screens for over 30 years? Of course, he’s gone from his goofy “Bill Nye The Science Guy” persona, showing kids different science experiments, to his goofy but all the more serious “We’re doomed if we don’t pay attention” persona. But in the past ten or so years, he’s found some very creative ways to get the message across that we’re destroying the planet and it’s about to go downhill quickly. In his new Peacock series, he teams with The Orville‘s Seth MacFarlane and Brannon Braga to show what some of these consequences look like in real life, and what we can do to stop world-ending disasters like he’s describing.

THE END IS NYE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “Look at that. Our beautiful blue planet,” says Bill Nye as we look at a shot of the earth. “It looks so peaceful, but all isn’t what it seems.”

The Gist: In The End Is Nye, Bill Nye looks at various mega-disasters that would more or less spell the end of human life as we know it right now, and all of them are entirely possible, given the condition the planet is in right now. Nye is an executive producer of the series, along with Seth MacFarlane and Star Trek veteran Brannon Braga, who also directs the episodes. MacFarlane and Braga are also the brains behind The Orville, so Nye is assisted by a ton of visual effects.

In the first episode, as Nye enters the “disaster simulator” in his Disaster Institute museum, he talks about superstorms. The possibility that hurricanes that have never been seen before can be generated by the ever-warming oceans is a distinct possibility. The scenario Nye shows is what would happen if five such superstorms — a “Hyrdra storm” developed simultaneously and hit different coastlines all over the planet.

He centers the experience on Houston, where a National Weather Service forecaster (Deena Aziz) tries to get an early warning out but is blocked by government officials, including a fear-hating secretary of commerce (MacFarlane). A coffee shop owner (Joanna Mandap) stays in her shop to ride out the storm. And an airplane passenger (Kwasi Songui) white-knuckles his way through extreme air turbulence as the pilot of an international flight can’t anticipate the size and path of the storm.

After Nye lays out these disaster scenarios, he demystifies how these storms are created, and gives solutions that can alleviate or eliminate the possibility something like that would happen, from using walls of wind turbines to deflect storm winds, to methods to reduce CO2 in the air, to encouraging the use of renewable energy, things he thinks are very doable within the next few decades.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Bill Nye Saves The World mixed with an episode of The Orville.

Our Take: Bill Nye has been beating the drum of climate-change disaster for some time now, but The End Is Nye brings his scientifically-based expressions of frustrations and warnings about our future to spectacular life. Instead of him just telling people what might happen if we don’t make big changes, we see what happens. And it sure as hell isn’t pretty.

Some of the effects and sci-fi-epic music that Braga adds to each episode can get to be a little much, but it serves a purpose. If you don’t think something like this can happen, or that they could and we’ll come out relatively unscathed, you’re wrong. This is realistic-looking stuff, not disaster-movie fluff.

If the show falls down anywhere, it’s in the second half of the episode, where Nye explains how the human race can reverse and maybe even alleviate the danger, mainly because he’s mixing opinion in with the science he shows. He gives solutions that are in place in small ways, like artificial trees that collect carbon dioxide and store it, as well as things like remaking wetlands that have been paved over. But during those segments, he doesn’t give information on just how much these solutions need to scale up in order to make a difference, and how much that might cost.

While the show skews more towards the entertainment part of “edutainment”, The End Is Nye still gives viewers enough information, and some pretty scary visual effects, to at least scare doubters into maybe taking some action.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Nye looks at the model of the earth in the museum and says, “We all share the same air, we all share the days ahead. And I see a future with clear skies.”

Sleeper Star: The visual effects team do a great job of making the disasters that Nye and the other people go through look frighteningly real.

Most Pilot-y Line: As the plane he’s on thrashes about in the storm, Nye says it’s looking less likely the plane will be able to land. “Technically, we’ll land on something,” he quips. The white-knuckle passenger speaks for all of us when he says, “Would you shut the [bleep] up!”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Nye is as engaging as always in The End Is Nye, and he’s now helped along by Braga and MacFarlane in his mission to get as many people as possible to see that the dangers to are planet are real, and they’re spectacular.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.