Enlarge / The cast of the program is introduced. (credit: John Timmer)

To promote its upcoming new miniseries Mars, the National Geographic Channel convinced its associated magazine to print a Mars-focused issue, and it set up a VR-Mars outpost in the middle of New York City. For the channel, the miniseries is more than just a new show; it’s part of an effort to rebrand itself as a source of serious, premium, science-focused content.

So, while the series’ focus is a fictional drama about the Earth’s first attempt at colonizing Mars, a strong effort has been made to be as accurate and realistic as possible. Fictional segments are mixed in with documentary footage from the present day, with experts talking about what it would take to get people to the red planet. The results make for decent TV, but suffer when compared to the recent film The Martian.

A quest for accuracy

In introducing Mars to the New York media, National Geographic gave more time to the program’s scientific advisors than it did to the cast. And said advisors were an impressive bunch, including former astronauts, present astronomers, and a professor of aerospace engineering. Their job, as they described it, wasn’t just to give scripts a quick sanity check; it was to make sure that everything was accurate.