A spinoff of Apple TV+’s For All Mankind is in the works — but what is there to know about Star City so far?
For All Mankind, which premiered in 2019, introduced an alternate version of history where the Soviet Union landed on the moon before the United States. The series explored the consequences of the continued space race, which took inspiration from the lunar plaque left on the moon by the crew of Apollo 11.
The show featured historical figures including astronauts, NASA officials, American presidents and other politicians. For All Mankind starred Joel Kinnaman, Shantel VanSanten, Jodi Balfour, Wrenn Schmidt, Sonya Walger, Krys Marshall, Cynthy Wu, Coral Peña and Edi Gathegi, with Toby Kebbell, Tyner Rushing, Svetlana Efremova and Daniel Stern rounding out the cast.
In April 2024, For All Mankind was renewed for a fifth season — and received a spinoff.
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“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 at the time. “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 TV+’s head of programming Matt Cherniss addressed the news in a statement of his own, which read, “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. 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.”
Star City will explore the same story as For All Mankind — but from the Soviet Union’s perspective. Keep scrolling for everything to know about the upcoming spinoff:
Who Is the Team Behind ‘Star City’?
Creators Ronald D. Moore, Wolpert and Nedivi will expand the For All Mankind universe. Nedivi and Wolpert have been appointed show runners of the upcoming spinoff series.
What Is the Synopsis of ‘Star City’?
According to the synopsis, 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.”
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Who Is in the ‘Star City’ Cast?
Rhys Ifans stars as the Chief Designer, who is described as “the driving force behind the Soviet Space program.” Anna Maxwell Martin will share the screen with Ifans as Lyudmilla, the head of the KGB surveillance department at Star City.
What Can Fans Expect From the Show?
Moore spoke with Collider in June 2024 about the highly anticipated spinoff, saying, “We’re in the writing period of the spin-off series, Star City, which is very exciting. I’m very happy that Apple was supportive of that whole concept and to do it and to tell the story from the cosmonaut point of view and how the Russians got to the moon first and what it was like to work in that program.”
While working on Star City, the writers learned historical facts they weren’t aware of before.
“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,” Moore continued. “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.”
He continued: “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.”
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How Many Seasons Will ‘Star City’ Have?
Moore confirmed that the creative team has thought ahead for Star City, telling Collider, “No, we have a path. We have a general arc. It’s probably not as detailed as what we started off with on For All Mankind, but we have a general sort of, ‘OK, here’s the structure of how this would play out over several seasons.’”
There are also plans for a time jump similar to For All Mankind.
“We know we are gonna jump through time. We haven’t quite got to that point yet. It’s probably still a in-the-decade, or so, jump ahead,” Moore added. “We don’t know if we’re gonna do exactly what the Mankind jumps were or if we’ll try to split them in the middle.”
How Will ‘Star City’ Address the Language Barrier?
“They’re writing it right now, so that’s one of the questions that’s on the table at the moment is, ‘OK, how do we do that?’” Moore noted to Collider. “I know that Matt and Ben have played around with different ideas about it. We’re probably not going to [have everyone speaking Russian with English subtitles], but it has been discussed.”
