FOR ALL MANKIND Season 1 Review

Ahead of the second season launching this Friday on Apple TV+, Matthew Kresal takes one giant leap through the first series of For All Mankind.

Storytelling is, fundamentally, a matter of someone asking, "what if?" Alternate history, imagining versions of history that might have been, is an extension of that, which perhaps explains its popularity on the printed page especially. More recently, thanks in part to the renaissance in television production brought about by the streaming age, those visions of a different past have been coming to our television screens. One of them has been For All Mankind from Apple TV+.

The first season of the show quickly established its premise for viewers. Its opening episode presents a quick montage of footage from the Space Race of the late 1950s and 1960s, including the seemingly obligatory speeches of John F. Kennedy before taking us into the drama proper on a night in July 1969. But as we meet the show's various characters, it becomes clear that despite what viewers may think, this is not the triumph of Apollo 11. Instead, a Soviet cosmonaut steps foot on the surface of the Moon. The race isn't drawing to a close as it did for us. It's just beginning.

Taking viewers across a quite different 1969-75 in ten episodes, For All Mankind's opening season operates in three phases. The first two episodes essentially present the point of divergence from our reality at its most dramatic moment (though as references in the opening episode quickly reveal, things changed awhile before the show started) and its immediate effects. Episode three through five show the proverbial butterfly wings flapping as changes begin taking hold, including the search and eventual induction of a group of women astronauts. The back half of the season sees everything established but not without danger as a series of crises threaten lives, careers, and the entire Apollo program. It's a lot of ground to cover, but it's something that suits the story that creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi set out to tell.

Yet, despite presenting a vision of continued voyages to the Moon by Apollo, things aren't all cheery and wonderful. The nature of drama is conflict, and from personal demons threatening to get the better of astronauts to the shifting role of women in society, to sexism, homophobia, and political backstabbing, there's plenty to be found in the series. While some of its takes on people and events are undoubtedly revisionist, particularly in its treatment of the Mercury 13/FLATs group of 1960s women astronaut trainees (as The Vintage Space's Amy Shira Teitel, who wrote Fighting For Space on them spoke to in a video she did in 2019) they nevertheless work well in the show's context. Ultimately, what For All Mankind does is combine the wonder and ambition of the era with a more realistic, perhaps slightly cynical, hindsight of something like Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff about the forces at work around those visions.

That vision is given a significant boost by just how well brought to life the show is. From recreating the Apollo spacecraft and spacesuits (and eventually showing their evolution) to Mission Control in Houston, there's enough attention to detail to make a space nerd happy. The attention to period detail also feels on point, and one wonders how much the series spent to get enough Corvettes for its astronaut cast to drive, to name but one example. The effects work is equally solid with some breathtaking shots on the Moon that wonderfully capture both the sense of scale and the sense of "magnificent desolation," as Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin described it. Jeff Russo, whose music has graced much of the recent TV incarnations of Star Trek, likewise brings a sense of grandeur but also emotion to proceedings, ably backing the production.

That's not without forgetting the cast, of course, who bring the characters of For All Mankind to life. There are the astronauts, of course, from Joel Kinnaman's outworld easy-going but inwardly brooding Ed Baldwin to Sonya Walger as the cynical former Mercury 13 member Molly Cobb, and the husband and wife duo of Gordo and Tracey Stevens, played by Michael Dorman and Sarah Jones. There's those on the ground, from Wrenn Schmidt as determined rising Mission Control member Margo Madison to Shantel VanSanten as Ed's wife Karen, who increasingly tries to come to terms with the changing world around her family, and Olivia Trujillo as a young illegal immigrant whose father's work at the space center in Houston opens a door of possibilities for her future. There's also a host of historical figures at play in the supporting cast, from Chris Bauer as astronaut Deke Slayton to Eric Ladin as Flight Director Gene Kranz and Colm Feore as the man who built the Saturn V, Wernher von Braun. These are just some of the highlights, who each find ways of shining across the season's ten episodes as they bring the world of the series to life as much as the period recreations and effects.

With its mix of alternate history scripts, nostalgia with a revisionist eye, period detail, and effects with a strong cast, For All Mankind's first season stands as a triumph. Not only that but making for compelling viewing along the way. With its second season starting on the 19th of February taking the show into the 1980s, there's not been a better time to stream it, looking to the stars and wondering what might have been.

Season two of For All Mankind launches on Apple TV+ on February 19th 2021.

Matthew lives in North Alabama where he's a nerd, doesn't have a southern accent and isn't a Republican. He's a host of both the Big Finish centric Stories From The Vortex podcast and the 20mb Doctor Who Podcast. You can read more of his writing at his blog and at The Terrible Zodin fanzine, amongst other places.