Movies & TV Star City Star City: A For All Mankind Spinoff for Fans and Newcomers Alike The new series has a very different tone from its predecessor, which might be part of the appeal. By Lacy Baugher Milas | Published on May 29, 2026 Image: AppleTV Comment 0 Share New Share Image: AppleTV Spinoffs are often unpredictable beasts in the world of entertainment. While every network and streamer undoubtedly wants the opportunity to capitalize on the success of a familiar, already beloved property, they’re hard to do well. (To put it another way, for every Better Call Saul that captures lightning in a bottle, there are far more misfires like Once Upon a Time in Wonderland or How I Met Your Father.) These kinds of series must serve many masters: They need to stand on their own as a story, entice existing franchise fans, and remain accessible to viewers who’ve never seen the original. It’s a delicate balancing act, and one that even the most successful sequels, prequels, and in-universe expansions can struggle to manage.  Apple TV’s Star City is a spin-off of its critically acclaimed alternate history science fiction drama For All Mankind, which asks a disarmingly simple question: what if the Soviet Union had won the race to the moon in 1969? In exploring the butterfly effect of that single change, the original series catapults humanity further into the stars than anyone could have believed possible. And by the time Season 5 (set in a version of 2012) rolls around, its story has evolved to include everything from a Martian space colony to a search for life among Saturn’s moons. Star City takes the franchise back to its beginning, offering a grittier, darker companion piece that interrogates the series’ original point of divergence through a completely new lens.  Image: AppleTV Taking audiences through the space race from the perspective of those living and working in the U.S.S.R, Star City begins at the same moment For All Mankind once did, with cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (Sam Wilkinson) becoming the first human to walk on the moon. But what follows is very different, as the show journeys behind the Iron Curtain for an in-depth exploration of what the Soviet Union’s space program—and life in a country that had achieved such a triumph before the United States did—is like. Put in the unenviable position of crafting an alternate take on a pre-existing alternate history, Star City still manages to distinguish itself tonally and stylistically, expanding the world of its larger franchise rather than retreading what we’ve seen before.  Technically, For All Mankind isn’t even required viewing to enjoy this spin-off, which is as much an espionage thriller as it is a sci-fi drama. But it’s also almost certain to appeal to those fans who have already bought into the franchise’s worldbuilding and who are comfortable with its occasionally creepy “this isn’t our reality, but, wow, it occasionally sure does rhyme with it in uncomfortable ways”-style premise. The series initially follows the Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans), the anonymous space program head whose life is carefully monitored and controlled—and whom the original series hinted was most likely based on the real-life Soviet engineer Sergei Korolev. Thrilled by the success of the lunar landing, the Chief Designer has grand dreams of expanding Soviet spaceflight beyond the moon. However, his superiors are more interested in power, control, and publicly humiliating America on the world stage than in genuine scientific advancement.  Yet, it’s apparent fairly immediately that for all the glory the Chief Designer has won for his homeland, he is also essentially a prisoner within it. Given a hero’s award he can’t keep and a victory parade he isn’t allowed to attend because he must keep his identity a secret from the public, he has little freedom, physically or otherwise. His superiors are uninterested in his plans for the next phase of the space program and insist that his focus remain on the moon, no matter how he feels about it. Still, the Chief Designer is both protective and fond of the cosmonauts he calls his “eagles”: Yana Akhmatova (Niamh Alger), Sasha Polivanov (Solly McLeod), Valya Mironov (Adam Nagaitis), and Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert), who are all eager to help make history, even though most of them aren’t allowed even to tell their families when they’re assigned to space missions until after they’re completed.  Image: AppleTV Although the show is named after its fictional home base of the Soviet space program (as well as the real-life Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow), Star City is as much about politics and personnel as it is about spaceflight, and the series weaves in stories of the base’s intelligence officers, scientists, and analysts alongside its cosmonauts. As the Chief Designer is forced to turn his attention to a mission to send the first woman to the moon, rumors fly about an American spy stealing Soviet secrets, and he frequently butts heads with the appealingly ruthless Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin), the head of KGB surveillance.  Raskova essentially sits atop a web of information, brought to her by her squad of female workers charged with listening in on virtually every resident of Star City. As she tortures potential informants and digs into personal lives in the hopes of tracking down the alleged mole, the Chief Designer scrambles to keep secrets of his own, particularly about his ultimate vision for the future of the space program, which doesn’t entirely mesh with the superiors who control his life. Franchise fans will recognize a few familiar faces from the world of For All Mankind, including young engineer Sergei Nikulov (Josef Davies) and junior surveillance agent Irina Morozova (Agnes O’Casey), both of whom will go on to play key roles on the main series and who get intriguing origin stories here. And cosmonaut Polivanov’s unique surname almost certainly implies he’s in some way connected to the man who’s currently the Governor of Mars in the fifth season of the flagship series.  Image: AppleTV While the five episodes available to screen for critics (out of a total of eight) feature a handful of breathtakingly intense space scenes, most of the action remains firmly Earth-bound. Like the earliest seasons of For All Mankind, Star City shines brightest when it digs into the interior lives of its characters, depicting the complicated strain that living under constant surveillance and brutal obligation to the state inevitably brings. However, the series’s unrelenting bleak tone and suffocating sense of paranoia mean that the spin-off as a whole lacks some of the humor and optimism that ultimately defined the original. It also doesn’t help that most of the characters’ default emotional states tend to register somewhere between “withdrawn” and “deeply emotionally repressed”; it’s difficult to feel as though we really get to know any of them beyond a surface level.  Still, the show has real potential. Ifans and Maxwell Martin have a deliciously fractious chemistry, and scenes in which the two of them butt heads are as entertaining as you might expect. O’Casey smartly doesn’t attempt to imitate Svetlana Efremova’s performance on For All Mankind, and her Irina is a softer, more emotionally malleable figure, one that’s still capable of being horrified by the things her government asks her to do in its name. (For All Mankind fans will have loads of questions about how this character will transform in the years to come.) And the season’s larger plot, which involves multiple betrayals and a secret off-the-books space mission no one’s supposed to know about, is much more ambitious than the initial descriptions of the series indicated. Where this story is ultimately headed remains an open question. But it’s a journey that (at least for now) seems worth signing up for.[end-mark] The post <i>Star City</i>: A <i>For All Mankind</i> Spinoff for Fans and Newcomers Alike appeared first on Reactor.