For All Mankind

In the UK: Available on Apple TV+

Behold! We are entering a new age. Apple TV+ is upon us. Depending on when you last bought an Apple product, there’s a new streaming service in town that’s either free for a year or £4.99/month – and it’s got four new TV shows for you already. Or at least the first three episodes of four new TV shows for you – how quaint and not boxsetty.

It’s an equally quaint initial line-up:

• The star-studded The Morning Show, which is a sort of Aaron Sorkin take on morning TV
• See, a post-apocalyptic fantasy show, in which everyone (more or less) is blind, that hopes desperately to be better than every other TV show in which Jason Momoa has starred (cf Frontier, Stargate: Atlantis, Baywatch Hawaii)
• Dickinson, a sort of A Knight’s Tale biopic of Emily Dickinson

And For All Mankind – the most appealing of the bunch. It’s billed as coming from the mind of Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D Moore and depicting an alternative reality in which the space race never ended and “astronauts were seen as rock stars”.

That is not what For All Mankind is like. At all.

Red Peril

For starters, Ronald D Moore doesn’t have much to do with it, as far as can be seen, beyond co-writing the first episode. Equally, over the first three episodes, it’s considerably more depressing than you might think. Okay, that’s quite Ronald D Moore, I’ll admit it.

The first episode sets up this alternative universe in which “the space race doesn’t end” by having the USSR pip the US to the post. First man on the Moon? Alexei Leonov who doesn’t say anything about it being “one giant step for mankind” but dedicates his landing to the Marxist-Lenist way of life.

The US is miserable. The whole world is miserable. All the US astronauts are miserable. It doesn’t help when NASA loses touch with Apollo 11, just a few weeks later, when the LEM crashes into the moon’s surface. Poor old Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin; hell, Michael Collins is going to kill himself while he’s still orbiting the moon.

Depressing, huh?

Yet it’s from that thoroughly miserable start that the show does at least manage to course-correct and become something a bit more interesting. And less depressing.