For All Mankind’s ending sets up another great Apple TV sci-fi release

For All Mankind season 5 airs its final episode on May 29, with the alt-history space-race show’s sixth and final season expected to premiere in 2027. But fans of the show’s mix of personal drama, politics, and high-stakes space missions won’t have to wait until then for something to fill the void thanks to a show that’s flying completely under the radar thanks to a deceptive title.

Created by Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi, For All Mankind was one of Apple TV’s first big streaming success stories when it premiered in 2019. It helped turn the platform into one of the best subscriptions for science fiction fans, setting the stage for future hits like Severance and Murderbot. The show opens in 1969 with the United States rocked by the news that a Soviet cosmonaut has become the first person to land on the moon.

Over the course of five seasons, the series creators have explored what that big shift in the Space Race could have meant for the future of space exploration and world history. Every season of For All Mankind ends with the story jumping a decade into the future, ramping up the sci-fi elements as the timeline progresses. The current season is set in 2012 and could practically act as a prequel to The Expanse as it focuses on rising tensions between Earth and colonists living on Mars. Those time jumps have also meant replacing cast members or covering returning ones with increasingly heavy aging makeup.

Luckily, dedicated fans of For All Mankind and anyone who might have fallen off in early seasons have the perfect new sci-fi drama to watch, which is releasing its first episode on the same day as the For All Mankind season 5 finale: Star City.

Star City has more intrigue and less sci-fi than For All Mankind

Star City comes from the same showrunners as For All Mankind, but it focuses on the Soviet side of the Space Race. While the USSR humiliated its geopolitical rivals, the U.S. is trying hard to catch up by infiltrating Star City, the top-secret base of the Soviet space program. The result is a far tenser story than For All Mankind, where characters are more afraid of being dragged in for interrogation than they are of being launched into space in an experimental rocket.

“Being in the world of this sort of Cold War paranoid thriller was really an exciting, different challenge for us, telling the story of these cosmonauts and engineers who all lived in this isolated city and were together with the intelligence officers who were monitoring their phone calls and listening to every conversation,” Wolpert told Polygon recently. “[We’re] capturing that sense of paranoia and not knowing who to trust.”

Some cosmonauts have shown up in For All Mankind, but this spinoff features an entirely new cast. While the final season of For All Mankind will push the show very close to our present, the showrunners plan to keep Star City set in the ‘70s. That means you’ll get to enjoy more ‘70s music and styles and not have to worry about losing a favorite character or suddenly having to really care about their child.

“To not have to think about what our characters are doing 10 years later and have to age our poor actors, being able to just pick up when the next season starts the next day or a week later, it sounds like a dream to us,” Wolpert said.

How to watch Star City

If you’re a fan of For All Mankind and other sci-fi shows like Severance and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, chances are you already have an Apple TV subscription. If not, you can get a free trial for a week to check Star City out and then pay $12.99 a month after. You can also add a subscription to Peacock for $2 more each month.

The first two episodes of Star City drop on May 29, with new episodes releasing on Fridays through July 10. Apple is hoping to keep viewers around with a fairly deep schedule of sci-fi series including Silo returning for season 3 on July 3 and Dark Matter returning for season 2 on Aug. 28.