“For All Mankind,” Apple TV+’s critically acclaimed series that follows an alternate history version of the space race, has been renewed for a fifth season. And, along with it, creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi are set to expand the “For All Mankind” universe with a brand-new spin-off series “Star City.” Wolpert and Nedivi will showrun the new series, set within the Russian space program. Both series are produced for Apple TV+ by Sony Pictures Television.
“Our fascination with the Soviet space program has grown with every season of ‘For All Mankind,’” said executive producers Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi said in an official statement. “The more we learned about this secret city in the forests outside Moscow where the Soviet cosmonauts and engineers worked and lived, the more we wanted to tell this story of the other side of the space race. We could not be more excited to continue building out the alternate history universe of ‘For All Mankind’ with our partners at Apple and Sony.”
“With each new season, ‘For All Mankind’ continues to build out a fascinating world and capture global audiences through high quality storytelling that has been so skillfully developed by Ron, Matt and Ben,” said Matt Cherniss head of programming for Apple TV+, in an official statement. “There is so much to explore and, we along with our partners at Sony, can’t wait to dive into this next chapter of the engrossing ‘For All Mankind’ universe.”
Described as “a propulsive paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race,” “Star City” explores how the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. This was covered early in the “For All Mankind” run, but this time “we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward.”
Not only is this a really great approach to a spin-off, but it also sidesteps one of the perhaps more cumbersome issues with “For All Mankind,” which is that each season we leapfrog forward in the future an entire decade. (The old man make-up artists are constantly being kept on their toes.) It’s an ingenious framing device and leads to some of the most propulsive storytelling on television, but there are times when you wish that they would slow down and marinate not only in the amazing characters but in this fascinating, alternate history version of the world that they have meticulously crafted.
Something tells me that we’ll still check in on the American astronauts around the same time …
Nedivi and Wolpert serve as showrunners and executive producers of “Star City” alongside Moore and Davis of Tall Ship Productions.
All four seasons of “For All Mankind” are now streaming globally on Apple TV+. If for some reason you haven’t watched yet, do yourself a favor and catch up now, before the “For All Mankind” universe expands even further.
