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Connections 2
1994 · TV series · documentary · 1 season
Historian James Burke walks the viewer through the tenuous threads of history that link seemingly obscure scientific breakthroughs and the events and products that exist today.
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3 comments on Hacker News
Agreed that Connections 2 and (especially) 3 were pale shadows of the original series.
However the related The Day the Universe Changed, which took a slightly different conceit (the episodes aren't necessarily linear in time) and focus (science and philosophy rather than technology), is excellent, and I'd put it right next to the original Connections series.
(There is, it turns out, a fourth season of Connections, "Connections 4", released in 2023 on Curiosity Stream according to Wikipedia. I've net seen any of it. It consists of only 6 episodes. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)#Series_4_(2023)>.
I think if you watch Connections 2 & Connections 3 (and even Start Trek: The Next Generation) then you can see the progression that all documentaries went by the 1980s. "Story" used to be more important, but then "eye candy" became far more important.
Connections was so influential that my university (Purdue) introduced a 3 semester series of courses on the history of technology.
There was a Connections 2 series in 1994 which is the one I remember watching and loving as a teenager: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0370117/