Ann Druyan and Steven Soter Win Emmy for Writing Cosmos

Posted on August 17, 2014

Ann Druyan and Steven Soter won the Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming at the Creative Arts Emmys ceremony which was held last night at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles.

The creative Arts Emmys are held one week before the Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony, which will be broadcast live on Monday, August 25,2014. The duo won the award for COSMOS: A SpaceTime Odyssey, the show which was an updated version of Carl Sagan's original Cosmos show. The new Cosmos recented aired on Fox and National Geographic channels and was hosted by astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Druyan, who is the widow of Carl Sagan, co-wrote the original Cosmos series which aired in 1980. She felt passionately about bringing the original show to a new audience, with updated graphics and science. She didn't have much luck until she met Seth MacFarlane, who is a huge fan of the original Cosmos series and Carl Sagain. It was MacFarlane that pitched the show to the head of Fox and got it made.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Druyan said that she wanted to revive the show because of the wave of anti-science that has swept the country in the past decades since her husband died. She was concerned about textbooks about evolution were being banned in classrooms and that it now seems almost cool to ignore scientific fact.

The other writing award given out at the Creative Emmys went to the writers for The Colbert Report, who won for Outstanding Writing For A Variety Series. The winners were the head writer for comedy central, Opus Moreschi, Stephen Colbert and the entire Colbert writing team. You can see the entire list of winners here.