Culture
Documentaries & Series
From Errol Morris's film of A Brief History of Time to Into the Universe and Genius: the documentaries and series that let Stephen Hawking explain the cosmos himself.
Last updated 23 May 2026 · How we research
Beyond his books and his cameos, Stephen Hawking reached enormous audiences through television. Documentaries gave him room to do what he did best, guide ordinary viewers through the deepest questions in science, and he presented and inspired a long run of them across three decades.
Films about his ideas
In 1991 the acclaimed documentary-maker Errol Morris released a film of A Brief History of Time, blending Hawking's cosmology with the story of his life. It set a template that later programmes would follow: using the drama of the man to draw audiences into the science.
Hawking's own presenting work began in earnest with Stephen Hawking's Universe, a series from the late 1990s that toured the history and structure of the cosmos. He returned to the form repeatedly over the years, lending his voice and authority to ambitious, visually rich productions.
Into the Universe and Grand Design
In 2010 the Discovery Channel released Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, a high-production series in which he narrated explorations of aliens, time travel and the fate of the cosmos, presenting bold ideas in accessible terms. It was followed by further series, including programmes built around the arguments of his book The Grand Design, bringing his more philosophical late thinking to television viewers.
Genius
One of his most engaging television projects was Genius, a series in which Hawking set ordinary members of the public a series of profound questions, can you time travel, where did the universe come from, are we alone, and then guided them, through experiments and reasoning, to work towards the answers themselves. It captured his core conviction beautifully: that the great questions of science are not the property of experts but are open to anyone willing to think.
A dramatised life, too
His life as well as his ideas drew filmmakers. In 2004, well before The Theory of Everything, the BBC produced Hawking, a television film about his early years at Cambridge and the period of his diagnosis, with the young Stephen played by an actor then near the start of his own career. It focused on the science and the dawning of his illness rather than his marriage, offering a different emphasis from the later cinema biopic.
The common thread
Across all of these, the through-line is the same as in his books: a determination to make the universe comprehensible to everyone. Television let Hawking do that on the largest possible scale, turning abstract cosmology into something a family could watch together. For the written counterpart to these programmes, his books cover much of the same ground in his own words.
See the complete media library for his films and series.