Alt-space history series 'For All Mankind' gets 5th season, new 'Star City' spinoff

Apple TV+ is headed back to the past, and the future, with another season of the alternate space history drama "For All Mankind" and a new spinoff series, "Star City."

The streaming service announced the fifth season renewal and companion show on Wednesday (April 17), confirming that creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi are returning to head both programs.

"With each new season, 'For All Mankind' continues to build out a fascinating world and capture global audiences through high-quality storytelling that has been so skillfully developed by Ron, Matt and Ben," said Matt Cherniss, head of programming for Apple TV+, in a statement. "There is so much to explore and, we along with our partners at Sony, can't wait to dive into this next chapter of the engrossing 'For All Mankind' universe."

Related: 'For All Mankind' season 4 episode 10 review: A season finale that saves the best for last

"For All Mankind" began with the question, What would happen if the Soviet Union beat the United States to landing a man on the moon and the space race of the 1960s never ended? Spanning four decades over the course of its four seasons, the show has now reached the point where the space activities depicted are still in our future but are set in a timeline that is our past. 

Season 4, which concluded in January, was focused on the residents of Happy Valley, an international Mars base, and the pursuit by companies and countries — including the U.S., Soviet Union and North Korea — to mine asteroids. The 10 episodes were set in 2003, with a teaser pointing to the next season still on Mars but picking up in 2012. 

With "Star City," Moore, Wolpert and Nedivi are returning to the 1960s to provide an alternate view of the "For All Mankind" timeline. 

"Our fascination with the Soviet space program has grown with every season of 'For All Mankind,'" said Wolpert and Nedivi. "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." 

"We could not be more excited to continue building out the alternate history universe of 'For All Mankind' with our partners at Apple and Sony," said the two showrunners.

Apple TV+ describes "Star City" as "a propulsive paranoid thriller" that takes a second look at what followed Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov first setting foot on the moon in 1969. "For All Mankind" focused primarily on the U.S. side of the story, centering on NASA and its astronauts.

"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 humanity forward," reads a synopsis of "Star City."

The real Star City, or Zvyozdny gorodok (Звёздный городок), began as a classified Soviet Air Force base. Since the 1960s, it has been home to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, as well as the cosmonaut corps, who live in dachas (homes) within the confines of the still restricted-access facility.

Apple TV+'s "Star City" is produced by Moore (whose credits include "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and its spin-off series, as well as the re-imagined "Battlestar Galactica"); Maril Davis of Tall Ship Productions and Wolpert and Nedivi, who also serve as the new series' showrunners.

Wolpert and Nedivi will also continue to be the showrunners for "For All Mankind." They will also executive produce alongside Moore and Davis, as well as David Weddle, Bradley Thompson, Seth Edelstein and Kira Snyder. "For All Mankind" is produced for Apple TV+ by Sony Pictures Television.

All four seasons of "For All Mankind" are now streaming globally on Apple TV+.

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