Apple has renewed For All Mankind for a fifth season
And ordered a spinoff series
Apple released some exciting news earlier this week: it has renewed its space series For All Mankind for a fifth season, and has ordered a spinoff series called Star City, which will go back and explore the Soviet side of the story.
I'm pleased with this news: the show has remained a favorite since I first started watching, and while it hasn't blown up the cultural zeitgeist like Game of Thrones it's slowly and steadily built up an impressive story of our future in space.
If you haven't seen it, the series starts at the end of the 1960s when the Soviet Union puts a cosmonaut on the Moon before NASA can, kicking off an alternate space race where the US has to catch up. The first season is a little uneven: it focuses quite a bit on the efforts to build up the country's space capabilities (by allowing women and African Americans to join the astronaut corps), before settling in to a race to set up a base at the Moon's South Pole.
Andrew Liptak
From there, each season roughly jumps ahead a decade: season 2 is set in the 1980s as tensions between the US and USSR reach a breaking point on the Moon, while season 3 charts the progress of the efforts to reach Mars from both countries and a private space firm in the 1990s. The latest season is set in the 2000s as a Martian colony has taken root. When a valuable asteroid loaded with iridium passes by, the workers plot to rise up and take control of their fates.
In the season's last episode, we see another time jump into the 2010s: there's an extensive mining operation taking place on the asteroid, and presumably, this upcoming season will deal with the growing pains and tensions with Earth.
What's equally exciting here is the news of a spinoff: Star City. Star City is the home of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center and has been the center of the country's space activities since the space race. According to Apple, "is a propulsive, paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon." It looks as though we're going back to the 1960s, which would be cool, given that the show opens as the Soviets take the Moon: there's clearly some setup that they can play with. I'll be interested to see how this plays out in the long run; I can't quite imagine that the show will be For All Mankind-but-from-the-Soviet's-perspective would be all that fulfilling, but we'll see what we get.
TV production is such a delicate thing: there's never a guarantee that you'll be able to finish a story you set out to tell. The show's creators have said that they'd set out to do seven seasons, and even if they don't quite reach that milestone, they've laid down an excellent story thus far. Equally promising is that Apple's putting a spinoff series into play: that feels like a bit of added confidence on their part to keep exploring the world.
There's no word on when Season 5 will debut: there's generally been a year or a year-and-a-half gap between seasons, so maybe it'll be something to look forward to in 2025?