The article touches upon issues of the common and distinctive characteristics of documentary films and popular science TV series. It concerns special aspects of representation in these two screen forms in their sociocultural context and gives the author's vision of their sociocultural and anthropological foundations. The role of media images of the TV screen and the movie screen in the modern media space is substantiated. Approaching the audio-visualization of visuals from the angle of cultural studies and philosophy, mental activities of TV and movie viewers are opposed. Epistemologically, the article traces special accents typical for the popular science genre on the TV screen and in the cinema, boosted by documentaries. The relation between form and content in the screen visualization of ideas is substantiated.The present work touches upon issues related to the goals of creating documentary films, on the one hand, and popular science TV series, on the other. It covers the pictorial scheme of directing documentary films. Furthermore, the bases of visual representation in documentary film are presented. The complex process of creating a popular science series is considered as opposed to the versatility of this genre. The author proposes certain ideas about the productive mental activity of the viewers in terms of epistemological approach.He resorts to polemic arguments in the discussion about the development of an objective worldview. What offers the true image of the world around us, a popular science series or a documentary? The article puts up the elements of evidence as preconditions for the conformation of media semantic images through the screen. The special aspects of visual anthropology are touched upon. The author speculates about the possible correlation between documentary filmmaking and audiovisual information in ethnographic terms. The article ends with a number of conclusions.