Apple TV+ Fires Up a Fifth Season of For All Mankind and a Spin-Off

Krys Marshall as Dani Poole in For All Mankind (Photo: Apple TV+)

Krys Marshall as Dani Poole in For All Mankind (Photo: Apple TV+)

The alt-history space drama For All Mankind has taken great leaps throughout its run, and we don’t just mean the nearly decade-long time jumps between seasons. The series, from Ronald D. Moore, Ben Nedivi, and Matt Wolpert, has dared to imagine a world in which a significant setback in the space race led to greater innovation in the U.S. and, for a time, spurred social change (in this alternate timeline, the ERA was ratified in the 1970s).

In its fourth season, For All Mankind started to mine the cracks in that idealistic façade, and found that, given enough time, humanity would erect the same-old hierarchies from Earth on the Moon and Mars. The Season 4 finale, “Perestroika,” appeared to upend that order, and left viewers wondering what would become of Happy Valley and workers like Miles (Toby Kebbell). We won’t have to wonder too much longer, as Apple TV+ has just ordered a fifth season of the award-winning drama.

Nedivi has said there’s a six- or seven-season plan for FAM, whose alt-timeline just reached the year 2012 at the end of Season 4. That’s likely where Season 5 would begin, which means that soon enough, the series will zip right past our real-life present. Maybe there will be a future storyline about Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) swapping blood with his grandkids, à la Bryan Johnson, to stay, uh, competitive.

And it looks like life will imitate art, as the FAM universe expands with the spin-off Star City. Moore, Nedivi, and Wolpert are the co-creators, with the latter two also set to serve as showrunners on the spin-off.

This new drama, characterized as a “propulsive paranoid thriller” in Apple’s press release, will center on an alt-version of Star City, Russia, home of the U.S.S.R.’s space program. Wolpert and Nedivi say they became fascinated with remote town while working on FAM: “The more we learned about this secret city in the forests outside Moscow where the Soviet cosmonauts and engineers worked and lived, the more we wanted to tell this story of the other side of the space race.” There’s no word yet on when production will start on For All Mankind Season 5 or Star City.