https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/arts/television-six-smart-guys-sitting-around-talking.html Sections SEARCH Skip to contentSkip to site index Arts Today's Paper Arts|TELEVISION; Six Smart Guys Sitting Around Talking https://nyti.ms/298aB6S * * * * * Advertisement Continue reading the main story Supported by Continue reading the main story TELEVISION TELEVISION; Six Smart Guys Sitting Around Talking By Natalie Angier * June 12, 1994 * + + + + + [321877_360] Credit...The New York Times Archives See the article in its original context from June 12, 1994, Section 2, Page 31Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. FROM ITS PREMISE, "A Glorious Accident" sounds not like an accident but a mistake. Here we have more than 15 hours of public television -- more than the entire "I, Claudius" series, or Ken Burns's "Civil War" epic -- and what do we see during those vast pampas of time? Six middle-aged academic scientists sitting around talking. Admittedly, those talking heads contain some of the most interesting minds alive today. There is Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, author of "Awakenings" and peerless interpreter of neuropathologies as keys to the dark pockets of human consciousness. There is Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist, evolutionary theorist and inexhaustible science popularizer. And Freeman Dyson, an eclectic mathematician-physicist-idea-factory, who has proposed that humans will someday harness the energy of black holes and design artificial life forms like the so-called astro-chicken, which could survive in the frigid and lonely vacuum of the cosmos. These scientists take on the big questions that everybody cares about, even if teen-agers are the only ones who discuss them in polite company: Why are we here? What is consciousness? What is memory? Is human intelligence possibly a once-in-infinity event, the "glorious accident" of the title -- or is the evolution of consciousness an inevitable outcome of physical complexity and thus possibly common throughout the universe? Still, each of the seven programs in the series is very long. Each scientist is interviewed for more than 100 minutes; in the final episode, they all get together for a three-and-a-half-hour round-table discussion. There are no computer graphics to animate theories, and the visual elements that are used to break up the interviews -- shots of a cathedral choir singing Baroque cantatas or the bones and stuffed animals that decorate Mr. Gould's office -- seem almost quaint. Surely attention spans are too short and competing demands too great for this sort of format. Surely the series, which begins tonight on Channel 13, continues in prime time every night through Saturday, and then is to be rebroadcast in its entirety next Sunday, cannot succeed. (There are no plans yet for nationwide broadcast on PBS.) That was exactly what many people told Wim Kayzer, the Dutch television producer who put the series together. But when the program was broadcast in the Netherlands last year, it was a colossal hit. Holland has only 15 million people, and one million of them watched some or all of "A Glorious Accident," a rating usually reserved for sitcoms and dramas. A book based on the series was No. 1 on the Dutch best-seller list for months. For the final episode, 12 percent of the adult population tuned in, and the next day some universities closed to give people time to ponder the experience. Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist and writer who was one of the participants, said he has never encountered the sort of hoopla that "A Glorious Accident" raised. "It was a media phenomenon, and it was the most fruitful of anything I've ever done in terms of the response I've gotten," he said in a telephone interview. "When I go to Holland, people stop me on the street and talk to me on the trains. They just want to talk about scientific ideas." Mr. Kayzer, the producer, who is 47 years old and wears a dashing-looking black eye patch for medical reasons, has produced other well-received television programs in the Netherlands, including an interview series with writers and philosophers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and George Steiner, and documentaries about genetic testing, Hungarian society and Dresden's experience with Stalinism. Yet even he was surprised by his latest success and can only speculate on why the science series hit such a nationwide nerve. "Europe is falling apart," he said during a visit to Washington. "We have no more enemies. Communism is dead. The makeup of society is changing. We don't believe in God anymore, and there's no new ideology coming up. At such moments, people close the curtains and the doors. They don't want to be out there. They are reading more poems now. People want to escape from the vulgarity of life. There's a craving for answers." But then everything about the show surprised its producer. Mr. Kayzer never expected the scientists to agree to the project in the first place. "When I invited them, I was sure they would say no," he said. The roundtable discussion would require them all to come to Holland, he said, adding, "I thought they just wouldn't have the time." Indeed, Dr. Sacks is notorious for turning down practically every interview request he receives, and Mr. Gould for finding interviews loathsome. The other participants, Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of science and author of the acclaimed book "Consciousness Explained," and Stephen Toulmin, a physicist and science historian, are likewise relatively famous and in demand. But some of them were intrigued by Mr. Kayzer's invitational letter, which opened with a quote from "The Tempest": "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." More than the letter's soaring tone, the scientists were drawn in by the idea of meeting the others during the final round-table discussion. "It was great fun to meet these people I'd read but never met before," Mr. Dyson said. "That was the main point of it, and the reason why I agreed to participate." The first one to accept the offer was Mr. Gould, and he was the only one who made his participation contingent on the others'. Although the program's format is spare, the scientists bring to it a good measure of thought and imagination, telling stories, avoiding jargon and on occasion dangling from fragile branches with very little scientific evidence to back up their delightful speculations. At one point, for example, Mr. Sheldrake suggested that the sun be thought of as a sort of brain, the electromagnetic fields and solar flares not unlike the sparks that fly between one nerve cell and the next. The production was not without its snags and missteps. During the episode that features Mr. Gould, Mr. Kayzer and his camera crew arrived at Harvard University from Holland only to have the great paleontologist come in, look impatiently at his watch, declare that the interview would have to be an hour shorter than orginally planned (in the end, it lasted even beyond the time Mr. Kayzer had requested), and then spend the first portion lambasting the producer as a "hopeless romantic" who asked the sort of big, unanswerable questions scientists never try to tackle unless they have smoked too much marijuana. Mr. Kayzer has also been criticized by more than a few viewers of the series. Some complained that he interpolated himself in the action too often, while others wondered why he failed to include anybody who was not a white man of European ancestry. When asked that question during lunch, Mr. Kazyer grew annoyed. "I think it's a boring question," he said. "A lot of women have asked me that. They have been angry, incredibly angry, saying, why were there no women?" The coy answer for that, he said, is that "if science is defined as the Cartesian theater over the past 300 years, then it is male and white." But the real reason, he acknowledged, is, "I was interested in what these particular men are doing." Beyond the many scientific mysteries raised by the series is the immediate mystery of whether "A Glorious Accident" will play as well in New York as it did in Amsterdam. Harry Chancey Jr., a senior vice president of WNET, who decided to bring the series over, said "A Glorious Accident" is the sort of unconventional and risky program that is supposed to distinguish public from commerical television. He said he hopes viewers will come to feel they know the scientists as friends, as the sort of people they wish they could have over for a dinner party. And Mr. Chancey pointed to other PBS series that proved surprisingly successful, like Bill Moyers's interviews with the mythologist Joseph Campbell. "You can't find somebody in the business," he said, "who doesn't want to take credit for it now." Advertisement Continue reading the main story Site Index Site Information Navigation * (c) 2020 The New York Times Company * NYTCo * Contact Us * Work with us * Advertise * T Brand Studio * Your Ad Choices * Privacy * Terms of Service * Terms of Sale * Site Map * Help * Subscriptions