Read @ Joe’s

(Season 1, Episode 1, “The Eyes”)

Bucking the old adage that you can’t go home again, the architects behind Apple TV’s alt-history space epic For All Mankind return to the launchpad with Star City, a Soviet-side retelling of the lunar race that first ignited the franchise. After all, in the show’s timeline, it was Communist Russia, not the red-white-and-blue of the Apollo mission, that planted the first boots in lunar dust. Star City, then, asks the obvious question: what did victory look like from the other side of the Iron Curtain?

The answer, visually at least, is a world drained of color. Gone are the polished NASA blues and Houston chrome of For All Mankind. Here, everything is institutional gray, military green, and nicotine-stained white. Even the snow looks tired. Yet for all its bleakness, the series itself feels remarkably alive.

Title: Star City Release Date: May 2026 (Season 1) Creator: Ronald D. Moore // Ben Nedivi // Matt Wolpert Network: Apple TV IMDb Plot: Soviet cosmonauts, engineers, and intelligence officers risk everything in an ambitious space program aiming to be the first to reach the moon. Joe Says: The result feels less like For All Mankind and more like HBO’s Chernobyl: tense, somber, and beautifully acted. Star City may prove to be more than a clever spin-off. This could become one of Apple TV’s strongest dramas in its own right.

While the current fifth season of For All Mankind is set during the time of paperback-sized iPhones, albeit with Martian settlements – and the inevitable “Mars independence” storyline sci-fi can never resist – Star City rewinds to 1969. Under the command of the Soviet Union’s Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans, delivering gravitas with Cold War weariness), the Russians muscle their way to the moon. Not content with merely beating America there, the program quickly sends Cosmonaut Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert) to stake an even bolder claim: first woman on Luna.

And all of this unfolds at escape velocity. Where For All Mankind took half a season to reach the moon, creators of both series Ronald D. Moore, Ben Nedivi, and Matt Wolpert waste no time planting flags. Episode two wisely slows things down, grounding the story in Anastasia’s sudden celebrity and the machinery of Soviet mythmaking surrounding her.

British TV vet (and show EP) Nick Murphy directs, and he balances the victorious with the vicious throughout the pilot. Moments of cosmic awe and human triumph sit uneasily beside scenes of Stalinist intimidation and political torture. The message lands clearly: in Star City, the smoking gun is not just representational but a policy maker.

Mercifully, the cast avoids cartoon Cold War caricature. Despite portraying Russian officials and cosmonauts, the ensemble is largely British, Irish, Welsh, and Australian, and the performances wisely steer clear of Boris-and-Natasha parody. Instead, the actors lean into restrained humanity, giving the show a lived-in authenticity that keeps the drama ashore even when the rockets launch skyward.

More importantly, Star City understands that it cannot simply be “the Russian version” of For All Mankind. Where its predecessor often indulges in soaring speeches about human destiny and teamwork, usually with a heavy spread of primetime soap-opera cheese, this spin-off is quieter, sterner, and far more interested in the sons and daughters of Mother Russia, their aspirations, their fears, and their faults, too. Chief Designer, not a party man, remains committed to science and to hell with the consequences. Soviet Commander Lyudmilla (Anna Maxwell Martin) seeks to maintain Star City’s secrets by restraining such ambitions.

The result feels less like For All Mankind and more like HBO’s Chernobyl: tense, somber, and beautifully acted, all while being haunted by a sense of inevitable catastrophe. Yet despite the doom hanging over nearly every scene, the show never loses sight of the wonder of exploration itself.

If Star City can maintain that balance between spectacle and suffocation, it may prove to be more than a clever spin-off. This could become one of Apple TV’s strongest dramas in its own right. Da, Comrade?