‘For All Mankind’
Courtesy of Apple
Apple is doubling down on For All Mankind.
The iPhone maker and streamer has handed out a fifth season renewal for Ron Moore’s For All Mankind and a straight-to-series order for Star City, a spinoff following the Soviet space race.
As with the flagship series, Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi co-created Star City with the latter duo set to showrun both programs for producer Sony Pictures Television.
“Our fascination with the Soviet space program has grown with every season of For All Mankind,” said executive producers Wolpert and Nedivi in a statement announcing the news Wednesday. “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.”
Apple describes Star City as 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.
Moore, who handed over showrunning duties on For All Mankind in 2021 after he left his longtime overall deal at Sony for a rich pact with Disney, will be credited as an exec producer on the spinoff alongside Wolpert and Nedivi, Maril Davis of Moore’s Tall Ship Productions, and David Weddle, Bradley Thompson, Seth Edelstein and Kira Snyder. Sony Pictures Television is the studio on both shows.
“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 at 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.”
Since launching as part of Apple’s initial programs in late 2019, For All Mankind has become one of the streamer’s critical darlings. The drama currently has an impressive 93 percent among critics and 82 percent score with viewers on Rotten Tomatoes. (Apple does not release traditional viewership data; how many people watch its films and TV series is largely a mystery.)
For All Mankind is the second Apple original series to score a spinoff, with the news coming mere days after the tech giant renewed Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for a second season and confirmed that multiple spinoffs are in the works as part of a larger deal with producers Legendary Entertainment.
Since coming out of the writers strike late last year, the TV marketplace has been considerably slower as streamers and linear networks alike thin their rosters in an effort to right-size their programming rosters and reduce costs. While Apple is one of few companies to continue to spend big on high-profile packages, the big draw in the marketplace remains proven titles that can cut through — like For All Mankind.
Laura Davis is an entertainment aficionado who delves into the glitz and glamour of the entertainment industry. From Hollywood to Broadway, she offers readers an insider’s perspective on the world of movies, music, and pop culture.
