It's been quite the week for exciting news: my copy of The Tortured Poets Department should be on its way to me in anticipation of tomorrow's release date, and my favorite TV show, which also happens to be one of the best Apple TV Plus shows, has just been greenlit for a fifth season. Not only that, but the show is getting a spinoff series that sounds just as exciting.
For All Mankind, Apple's alternative-reality space race show, recently ended its fourth season with the traditional cliffhanger after a particularly tense story in which the Soviet space agency played a crucial part. That agency's HQ, Star City, will lend its name to the new spinoff show. .
“Our fascination with the Soviet space program has grown with every season of For All Mankind,” executive producers Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi said in a 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."
According to Apple, 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". It's from the same team as For All Mankind, and if it's as nuanced and well written as the US story then we're in for something special.
For All Mankind season 5: what we know so far
Apple is a long way from announcing a streaming date for For All Mankind season five, although if you're new to the show you can and you should watch all four seasons so far on Apple TV Plus. But it's likely to pick up where season four left off, with the timeline now in the early 2000s and humans living on the Happy Valley settlement on Mars.
It's likely that we'll be saying goodbye to some favorite characters this time around. Speaking to Variety, the show's creators discussed the ageing of key characters Ed and Dani, who've been with us since the first season. In the show, it's now 30 years since Ed's days as a hotshot astronaut, and he "isn't the spring chicken of Mars" in season four; "He is old man Mars".
According to executive producer Wolpert: "This is absolutely [a] transitional phase... you look at a lot of characters in that first season and we have already phased out characters because this show is about generational change. That's the nature of jumping a decade between each season." So with season five likely to be set in the early 2010s, Ed in particular will be way past pensionable age.
One thing we won't see, however, is space aliens. As Nedivi told Variety: "I think with this show and the unique space that we occupy in the sci-fi landscape, we try to keep our story as grounded and realistic as possible. So that hasn’t been in the cards, to be honest." Although maybe that's what he wants you to think.
Seasons one to four of For All Mankind are streaming on Apple TV Plus now.
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