Bill Nye is back — and dare I say edgier than ever — in the return television series no one asked for. Now sporting a silver helmet, The Science Guy demands the attention of the show’s adult audience with a gritty, cultivated demeanor. It’s clear that the new and improved Bill Nye isn’t here to mess around with kids — he’s back to save the world.
Bill Nye Saves the World is a fantastical production, measured by the massive studio where it’s filmed. Nye teaches us about climate change in a lab decked out with high tech equipment, lit with green and purple neon hues. The laugh track, as it quickly turned out, was mustered-up adrenaline laughter forced from a live audience responding to one of Nye’s not-bad, late-night style jokes. In fact, Nye tends to joke so much that some audience members can’t help but chuckle during a devastating experiment portraying the flood effects of climate change.
Bill Nye’s been off television for quite some time, since the last episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy aired on PBS in 1999. He’s kept up his media presence since, considering the popularity of his character, a host that loved to experiment and explain science-related topics to a young audience. From a 90’s kid-nerd, Bill Nye was a kid-nerd’s hero. But either Nye’s jokes aren’t aging well, or his shtick, a zany dad-figure mixing classroom safe chemicals in a bow tie and lab coat, doesn’t hold up when he’s also red-faced, screaming at the audience in falsetto about the dooming realities of climate change.
Trying too hard doesn’t even begin to explain what weird, desperate tone Bill’s new host persona is attempting to become. He’s a sixty-one-year-old man tripping over slang words: “I’m lovin’ me some Netflix,” he says awkwardly, as some people chuckle, probably in the same way you would chuckle when grandma asks what a “nae nae” is. When he tried quoting Jay Z to form a metaphor about climate change, it came out like this: “Paraphrasing my colleague Jay-Z, it’s not one problem, we got 99 problems, and they’re all… difficult.” Bill, please. Stop.
Through it all, though, Bill Nye is a TV star through and through. Despite having a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, he often knits his political commentary into his scientifically focused lectures. He can do this, because he’s a star. This glamorized version of himself is illustrated by his lab partners, supermodel Karlie Kloss and one-hit-wonder rap artist, Desiigner.
Karlie Kloss is no stranger to STEM — she’s known for Kode With Klossy, a project intent on empowering girls to learn how to code and become leaders in tech. But Desiigner’s appearance was justified by his breakout song, “Panda”, as a man in a panda costume suit accompanies Desiigner throughout his bit.
In a digital sketch introducing the episode’s topic, Desiigner tries to buy a chocolate bar in a convenience store when poof, Karlie Kloss appears behind him. Karlie tells him, to his dismay, that because of climate change, cacao will become scarce. He frowns, and the scene cuts to Desiigner attempting to buy some sushi when poof, Karlie materializes out of thin air to tell him that warming waters leads to overfishing, which will soon make our own sushi resources scarce as well. In melancholy disbelief, Desiigner walks back to his table where Panda waits for him. Panda disappears, and you guessed it, Karlie takes his place to remind us that the everything on Earth will die because of climate change.
There’s something off about Bill — his rants are neurotic, a vein often pulsing in the middle of his already bulging forehead. I’ve said that he was angry before, but man is he angry. The lectures start sensibly, like where he begins to explain what renewable energy is. Yet somehow his tone starts to shift, and his priorities become more general as he subtly blames the nation’s legislators. By the end of the rant he’s the old man with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism. Or, in this case, clean energy.
The experimental gimmicks, while they are pretty cool, don’t hold up in the presence of his desired demographic. Bill Nye is vexing for constituents to take him seriously in Bill Nye Saves the World, hoping that his never-ending flowing fountain of scientific knowledge will somehow save planet Earth. It’s hard for us to take Mr. Nye seriously when it’s sad enough watching a fallen hero fail to take himself seriously.
