David Farnor | On 17, Apr 2024

Apple TV+ has renewed For All Mankind for a fifth season – and is expanding the show’s universe with a spin-off series.

From Ronald D Moore, Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert, the alt-history series explores what would have happened if the global space race had never ended. The series presents an aspirational world where NASA astronauts, engineers and their families find themselves in the center of extraordinary events seen through the prism of a different but pertinent timeline – a world in which the USSR beats the US to the moon.

Since its global debut, the series has been hailed as among the best sci-fi shows on TV. Season 4 rocketed the series into the new millennium, taking place eight years after the third season, as the Mars colony continues to expand its footprint. Following that fourth season, Apple TV+ has now greenlit a fifth – and, in a sign of confidence from the tech giant, it has also orderd a spin-off series titled Star City.

Showrun by Nedivi and Wolpert, the spin-off will follow the Soviet space programme – and, in For All Mankind style, take us back to that key turning point of the alt-history narrative, when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. A propulsive, paranoid thriller, Star City will 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.

“Our fascination with the Soviet space program has grown with every season of ‘For All Mankind,’” said Wolpert and Nedivi. “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+. “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.”

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