One of the best things on “TV” (does it ever actually appear on television? – we don’t know!) is the collection of PBS shorts created for PBS Digital Studios and available on the PBS app or on YouTube. 

There is so much to appreciate here, from Erica Brozovsky, that downright hilarious sociolinguist, to the creepily eggheaded Dr. Emily Zarka of the gruesome Monstrum. 

The prehistoric series, Eons, has always been incredibly geekily fascinating, astonishingly detailed visits to Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, the sort of thing that makes you sit up and scream, Wait – we know all that? How?

PBS documentaries have for years featured the most photogenic/almost-attractive and easily-digestible physicists and other scientists (almost-handsome string-theorist Brian Greene circa 2003, anyone?), and so the great thing about PBS Digital Studios is the way its shows very much go the opposite way. PBS Digital Studios instead gives fifteen minutes of fame to the brilliant guy/lady/other who sits in in the very back windowless office, right next to the storage closet, who knows everything but who maybe never gets invited to fund-raising meetings with Simons Foundation, because, well…. 

They don’t make it onto Nova, maybe, but it’s a start! 

So our new-favorite Eons host is Michelle Barboza-Ramirez, a non-binary queer LatinX geologist, whose warm-chilly presentation and fashionably I-don’t-care look is really downright fascinating. 

And they seem to know all about stuff like how the elephant got its trunk, incredibly detailed knowledge about exactly what was going on with the elephant’s nose (and that weird early Miocene-epic jaw!) during every single geological era. 

Really, they would never have shown up on your grandfather’s PBS, and that’s too bad, but it’s nice to learn from them now.