TV networks will recognize the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre with several documentaries that reflect on one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history. 

Cable and broadcast networks such as CNN, History, National Geographic and PBS will debut over the next few weeks documentaries and specials that document the events surrounding the 1921 massacre, in which a white mob burned down a wealthy Black-owned stretch of businesses and homes in the Greenwood section of Tulsa. As many as 300 Black people were killed and more than 1,200 Black-owned homes and businesses were destroyed during the two-day massacre, which has  mostly been ignored by historians until recently. 

DeNeen Brown, Washington Post writer whose reporting is at the center of National Geographic’s Rise Again: Tulsa and Red Summer and PBS’ Fire and Forgotten documentaries, says the massacre’s depiction through such scripted series as HBO’s Lovecraft Country and Watchman has helped bring attention to the massacre. As more people become aware of the tragedy -- and as the country continues to discuss issues revolving around race and inequality in the wake of the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death -- the more they want to know more about it. 

"I think the reason we’re seeing so much media interest around the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is that it is one of the worst incidents of racial terror violence committed against Black people in U.S. history," Brown said. "For nearly 100 years, the massacre was deliberately covered up, kept out of textbooks and erased from history. Historians told me that for almost a century, civic and city officials in Tulsa orchestrated a deliberate campaign of silence."

The documentaries have also attracted such celebrities as NBA All-Stars LeBron James and Russell Westbrook, who serve as executive producers of CNN’s Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street and History’s Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre, respectively. 

Read Also: Programming Review: History's 'Tulsa Massacre' Spotlights a Forgotten Tragedy

Below is a partial list and premiere dates of documentary chronicling the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre:

May 30 -- Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre -- History 

May 31 -- Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street -- CNN

May 31 -- Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten -- PBS

June 1 -- The Legacy of Black Wall Street -- OWN

June 18 -- Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer -- National Geographic

For Hyundai, The Walt Disney Co.’s National Geographic Channel has created a co-branded augmented reality series that will let viewers experience and explore some of America’s iconic national parks.

Outside Academy--launching during National Park Week--promotes electric, plug-in hybrid and hybrid vehicles from Hyundai as eco-friendly and perfect for an outdoor adventure.

Created by Disney Advertising Sales’ National Geographic CreativeWorks unit with Hyundai, Outside Academy covers three parks, Zion, Yosemite and Great Smoky Mountains. Each edition was produced two ways. For Instagram, users can explore the parks virtually from their living rooms. On mobile devices, the experience is drivable and location enabled, informing users about the park they are visiting.

“Combining technology with creativity, we’re bringing audiences immersive ways to explore some of the most awe-inspiring national parks – whether they’re at home or visiting the locations in person – and seamlessly integrating Hyundai’s vehicles into the experience” said Andrew Messina, senior VP, Disney Advertising Sales. “We’re proud to deepen our relationship with Hyundai and continue pushing the boundaries of advertising with this first-ever co-branded AR series and offering innovative solutions to engage consumers.”

A digital destination contains content about the national parks including 360-degree presentations with multiple clickable hotspots, as well as information about Hyundai vehicles.

Outside Academy will be promoted with a full-page ad in the May issue of National Geographic magazine.

“Education for millions of students was disrupted this past year, so we partnered with National Geographic to create AR science, geography, and history lessons from three of America’s most famous national parks,” said Angela Zepeda, CMO, Hyundai Motor America. “We are also naturally integrating three of our eco-friendly vehicles that are perfect for adventure – the Santa Fe HEV, Tucson PHEV and all-electric Ioniq 5.”

The first AR experience on Instagram featuring Zion National Park and Hyundai’s 2021 Santa Fe Hybrid launched April 25. The drivable AR experience will become available starting on Thursday, May 20.

National Geographic Channel will take viewers on a live ride to all seven continents during a two-hour special Earth Live, one of several new shows the network announced Tuesday during its upfront presentation in New York.

Earth Live!, slated to air later this year, will feature an in studio host that will cut to live wildlife action across seven continents as it events take place, according to Courteney Monroe, chief executive officer of National Geographic Global Networks.

“No one has ever attempted to do this on such a large scale, and only National Geographic has the ability to do so,” Monroe said.

Other new shows include National Geographic Channel will expand its signature franchise Explorer into a host-driven, docu-talk series starring Richard Bacon. Explorer, which the network resurrected last year after a five-year hiatus, will serve as a weekly magazine-talk hybrid that drives the conversation on current events and topics that matter most to the planet, said network officials.

The network unveiled new plans for its six part miniseries Mars, which will combined a scripted story about the colonization of Mars with real-life documentary commentary. Mexican filmmaker Everado Gout (Days Of Grace) will direct the documentary, which will be produced by Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Michael Rosenberg of Imagine Entertainment.

Other series slated to debut on the network in 2016-17 include Origins, hosted by Jason Silva which will take viewers back through history via visual and musical mastery;  Chain Of Command, a 10-part series that will feature inside access to the U.S. military’s mission in Afghanistan as it unfolds over one full year; Lawless Oceans,  a six-part investigative series which follows special investigator Karsten von Hoesslin as he attempts to solve the mystery of a murder at sea caught on video; and Deep Freeze, which follows leading scientists on thier Antarctica-based missions.

Returning to the network is Year of Living Dangerously, which looks at the effects of climate change through such celebrity correspondents as Jack Black, Ty Burrell, James Cameron, David Letterman, Don Cheadle and Arnold Swchwarzenegger.

Prolific producer Scott Rudin has signed a three-year first-look deal with Fox Networks Group.

The three-year deal will see Rudin and his Scott Rudin Productions develop projects for cablers FX and National Geographic and the Fox broadcast network. Projects developed for FX Networks and National Geographic Channel will be produced by FX Productions, while those developed for Fox will be produced by Twentieth Century Fox Television.

“Scott is an extraordinary creative producer, and we are thrilled he is choosing to bring his unique passion for storytelling and storytellers to Fox's unique portfolio of studios and channels,” said Peter Rice, chairman & CEO of Fox Networks Group.

Known predominantly for his films, including Ex Machina, Top Five, Inherent Vice, Captain Phillips and The Grand Budapest Hotel, Rudin served as an executive producer for a pair of HBO series in The Newsroom and Silicon Valley, which were developed under a previous pact with the pay cabler.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

An evolutionary biologist, an astrophysicist, a Jesuit clergyman and a comedian walk into a room.

That’s not the opener for a joke.

It’s the lineup for one episode of what is billed as the only late-night talk show devoted to science, StarTalk on the National Geographic Channel (premiering April at 11 p.m. ET/PT). Neil deGrasse Tyson (he’s the astrophysicist), is hosting a TV version of his weekly podcast and radio show. Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and the telegenic successor to Carl Sagan, host of the TV series Cosmos (and a mentor to Tyson), has become this planet’s infectiously curious and charming cryptographer of the mysteries of the universe.

StarTalk is a talk show, but unlike most it’s an odd mix of pop culture, comedy and science — emphasis on the science. For the TV version, Tyson has wrangled a wide variety of cultural luminaries such as President Jimmy Carter, Richard Dawkins, Norman Lear, George Takei, and others for an hour-long romp through topics such as the warp drive on Star Trek, whether religion and science can coexist, and TV and the evolution of culture. Each week, with a comedian there for levity, Tyson explores the ways that science has influenced his guests and calls on his friend Bill Nye the Science Guy to weigh in on the week’s theme. The idea: Make science entertaining.

Tyson talked with Multichannel News editorial director Mark Robichaux about what the new series means to him. The conversation went deep quickly.

MCN: Let’s start off with a couple of easy questions here — what is the meaning of life?

NDT: [Laughs.] So, I actually have an answer to that. What often happens is people search for meaning in life, and that has driven much of people’s life’s quest. But I have come to realize in my old age that looking for meaning in life implies that it’s behind a tree or under a rock or over the hill. And that somehow it’s there and then you have it — as opposed to creating meaning in life by your actions and by your deeds and by your thoughts.

So for me, I try every day to create meaning in life. And I do so by holding to a couple of personal principles. One, I try to learn something new everyday. I try to know something more about the world tomorrow that I know today than I knew yesterday. I think that’s just a healthy posture to have, particularly as an adult when you are no longer still in school. And I think I also try to everyday in however small the gesture is, I try to lessen the suffering of others, however small that gesture might be.

That guides my daily objectives and, for me, that creates meaning every day of my life. So I’m not one of those in search of it because we all have the power to make meaning and not enough of us know that that may be the actual way to get it accomplished.

MCN: Are we alone in the universe?

NDT: Anyone who has studied the problem arrives at the conclusion that we are not likely to be alone at all, that there is surely life elsewhere, possibly even in our own backyard — aquifers under the soils of Mars, in the liquid oceans of Jupiter’s moons, Europa. So we haven’t fully explored our own backyard for life, especially on the possibility that life elsewhere would require liquid water the way we do.

But on another level, you might broaden that further and say, maybe life doesn’t require liquid water, maybe it just requires a liquid. And then could there be a planet of liquid ammonia or liquid methane or some other liquid that is not what’s plentiful here on earth, the water?

If we were alone it would be an extraordinary fact. So it’s less extraordinary to suppose that the universe and our galaxy is teeming with life rather than to suspect that on this little speck called Earth orbiting an uninteresting star called the Sun, in an undistinguished suburb of the Milky Way Galaxy that somehow we are the only place in the galaxy or in the universe with life. That would be inexcusably egocentric.

MCN: In your new showStarTalk, you run far afield of pure astrophysics. For example, “What is love?” Isn’t that a little bit out of your expertise?

NDT: One, the shows are not based on topics. The shows are based on the guest. Normally, when people think of science they think, “Oh, what topic are you going to talk about today and what experts will you bring to address that topic?” No, we bring in guests who are hewn from pop culture, to explore the topics that relate to the guest.

Every StarTalk is a blend of science, pop culture and comedy, comedy manifest by my co-host, who will always be a professional standup comedian in that model that we’ve established for ourselves.

MCN: Doesn’t that levity dilute the nature of the “cosmic” lesson you’re trying to give?

NDT: In studio, I have with me an academic anthropologist who specializes in the neurochemistry of love. And so we go back and forth between the science and the human physiology of relationships, of orgasms, of love. This is a person who has studied brain scans of people in love, people who are in lust, people who transition from love to hate. She has studied this, and she is a retained expert for Match.com.

We will lean cosmic in this, but any topic is fair game as long as it’s anchored in science or technology or the geek-o-sphere.

I don’t think of it as dilution, I think of it as, “I bet you didn’t know how much science there was in this pop-culture topic.” So, are we diluting the science or are we enhancing the pop-culture topic?

MCN: What is your goal for the show?

NDT: Our goal from the beginning was, how do we reach the people who don’t know that they like science or, better yet, are sure that they don’t like science? What excuse will they ever have for hearing a conversation about science? And what we learned is the way to make that happen is to bring people onto the show who have a following — and not because of science, but because of some other thing — and then my conversation with them is about science, and then an entire demographic hears their favorite person engage in a geeky conversation about how science impacts that person’s livelihood.

In that way, we grow the audience of people out there who would warm up to science, who might have had some ember that was growing dim.

Were it not for this fact about StarTalk, it would have never jumped species to television because it is the first talk show on science there ever was in the history of television.

So, I’d like to think that by the time you’ve seen an episode of StarTalk, you’ll say, “Wow, I didn’t know science was there.” I want people to realize that science is everywhere. StarTalk, while it will lean cosmic, all topics of science are fair game. Just so you know.

MCN: Will you have a late night band?

NDT: [Laughs.] No! No monologue, no late-night band. No. It’s only once a week, and they’re pre-recorded, so we’re not chasing the day’s headlines as is so common in the comedic monologues of the late-night talk shows. So the shows will have a certain evergreen aspect to them, which Nat Geo loves, ‘cause they get a lot of mileage from the programming that they air.

MCN: We have a box in some of our longer stories in the magazine called the “Takeaway.” What do you want people to take away from this series?

NDT: I want people to realize that you can be entertained for an hour and at the end of that hour still have learned something. And the learning was so blended with the laughter and your comfort with the pop culture that it doesn’t even register as learning, it just is the new state of mind that you acquire.