Apple TV+ isn’t ignoring the existing streaming trend towards espionage and intrigue-infused shows. They’ve got Slow Horses as a mainstay and Prime Target on the way to satisfy those urges. What is going down to a greater degree, however, is that the tech giant’s streaming service is going absolutely overboard (in the best way) with sci-fi offerings.
Both Foundation and Invasion will return for third seasons. Silo and Severance will be back for second helpings, and upcoming debuts will include The Gorge (starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy), Murderbot (starring Alexander Skarsgård), and Neuromancer (starring Callum Turner). Oh, and we must not forget to mention For All Mankind, one of the handful of shows that launched Apple TV+ in Nov. 2019 with a fifth season forthcoming.
Devotees of that particular series were not upset to learn that a spin off is afoot, too, so let’s talk about what to expect from Star City, which will travel into the alternate-history viewpoints of Russian cosmonauts who exist in the same space race (to the Moon, to Mars ^^^) as For All Mankind.
Plot
As viewers know, For All Mankind began in a 1969-set alternate universe where the Soviet Union beat the U.S. to the Moon, and a catch-up scramble followed. This led to time jumps in between seasons anchored by Joel Kinnaman’s NASA astronaut, Ed Baldwin, and we’ve seen alternate-space-race conditions during the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia and reflections upon conflicts with both North Korea and private space tourism at large. Star City has now received hints from the For All Mankind creators, starting with Matt Wolpert and Ben Nevidi, who are also onboard for the newer series.
According to an Apple TV+ press release, Wolpert and Nevidi couldn’t help but be driven to more curiosity about the inner workings of the Soviet space program in the show’s alternate history. As a result, the spin off will explore how “[t]he 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.”
Further (and more candid) insight came from For All Mankind fellow co-creator Ronald D. Moore, who spoke with Collider about how much more knowledge he has gained about Russian cosmonauts while plotting out Star City, for which the envisioned structure will fill “several seasons”:
“I didn’t know a lot about the Russian space program before I started doing this project. I knew an awful lot about the American program, but I think most Americans don’t know a lot of details about that. It was pretty ballsy stuff that they did. The spacecraft were not quite as reliable as ours were; they lost a lot of good people on them. The conditions were tough. They also had things like the KGB being around and hanging out in mission control, so there’s a lot of espionage and Cold War kind of environments that you’re dealing with in that particular show.”
Apple TV+ has also provided a description for what’s to come:
A robust expansion of the “For All Mankind” universe, “Star City” 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. 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.
Cast
Star City producers haven’t dropped any hints on casting or discussed whether any crossover (with forward and backward time jumps as necessary) might occur with For All Mankind characters.
Release Date
Apple TV+ also hasn’t revealed a release date for Star City, although it’s fair to assume that the spin off will be staggered and not arrive at the same time as the next For All Mankind season. As for which series will land first, we’ll have to wait and see.
Trailer
Since we’re still waiting for a peek at Star City, here’s a trip back in TV time to the first season of For All Mankind with a far less grizzled Joel Kinnaman, who must be spending so much time in the make-up chair for later seasons.
Space travel is a hell of a drug, man.
