Fans of Apple TV’s For All Mankind—which is currently airing its fifth season, with a sixth and final installment on the way—know that the alt-history series imagines that the Soviet Union won the space race and beat the United States to the moon. The show has since progressed decades past that moment in its history, but its upcoming spinoff, Star City, will drill into just how the Soviets pulled it off.
From the looks of this first trailer, there was quite a bit of aggressive paranoia and frantic energy mixed in with all the bravery and scientific hustle going on.
In an interview with io9 ahead of For All Mankind‘s new season, Star City showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi explained that their show will be different, beyond just the nationalities of its characters.
“This is not a show that jumps in time [like For All Mankind does] … it lives in the 1970s [as a] Cold War spy thriller behind the Iron Curtain,” Wolpert said.
Added Nedivi, “For us, the only reason to do a spin-off is if it feels like its own thing. It feels like you’re really adding a different element. So for us, this show is not only its own show; it’s its own genre. It’s a totally different look [and] feel.”
According to an Apple TV press release, “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 humankind forward.”
Star City was created by Wolpert, Nedivi, and Ronald D. Moore. It stars House of the Dragon‘s Rhys Ifans along with Anna Maxwell Martin, Agnes O’Casey, Alice Englert, Solly McLeod, Adam Nagaitis, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Josef Davies, and Priya Kansara.
You can catch the first two episodes of Star City May 29 on Apple TV; there will be a weekly rollout thereafter.
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