Renewed: Genius, Mars.

National Geographic is ramping up its scripted output, announcing a second season of Genius before the first has even premiered, plus three new scripted series and a second season of Mars.

Genius, which features Geoffrey Rush as Albert Einstein, premieres internationally on Monday. Season 2 will focus on a different subject, to be revealed during the Season 1 finale.

Docudrama Mars, which follows the fictional first human mission to Mars in 2033, is getting a second season returning to Mars years after the astronauts have established a full-fledged colony.

Both are produced by Fox 21 Television Studios, Imagine Television with executive producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard.

On the way are a new drama series The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution. Adapted from Jonathan Eig’s 2014 book of the same name, it follows feminist icon Margaret Sanger and philanthropist Katherine McCormick, who campaigned for women’s rights and championed birth control.

Ebola virus drama The Hot Zone is based on the international bestseller by Richard Preston and tracks the virus from the central African rain forest to its first arrival on U.S. soil. In 1989, when the virus suddenly appeared in chimpanzees in a scientific lab in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., there was no known cure.

Finally, the network is developing a scripted series based on its own origins, when a National Geographic field producer was put in charge of two production teams shooting Nat Geo’s first TV documentaries in Siberia and Australia in the 1960s.

Source: Variety