'For All Mankind' Spin-Off 'Star City' Puts a Lot of Brits In Space
Anna Maxwell Martin in 'A Spy Among Friends'
MGM+
Though most people are probably familiar with Apple TV+ because of singular hits like Ted Lasso or Severance, the streamer has a relatively significant catalog of excellent original dramas that get much less attention (and which far fewer people have heard of). One of its absolute best is For All Mankind, an alternate history of the space race that reimagines what the world would have been like had the Russians reached the moon first. The drama has spanned four seasons (and four decades) of what-ifs and imagined changes, and has not only been renewed for a fifth, but spawned its first spin-off, Star City.
The new series is a companion to the parent show, doing a reverse perspective on the original's already vastly changed history. Star City takes the story behind the Iron Curtain and follows the events of For All Mankind Season 1 from the Russian point of view. However, if the series' original rush of casting announcements is anything to go by, the various Russian cosmonauts, engineers, and intelligent officers will predominantly be played by actors who will be very familiar to Anglophiles. Much like HBO's critically acclaimed Chernobyl, the bulk of the so-called "Russians" are all going to be secretly from the United Kingdom.
Rhys Ifans (House of the Dragon) and Anna Maxwell Martin (Until I Kill You) are set to lead the new spin-off. Ifans will play an as-yet-unnamed character known only as the "Chief Designer," the driving force behind the Soviet Space program. Martin will play Lyudmilla, the head of the KGB surveillance department at Star City.
Here's the series' description.
A robust expansion of the For All Mankind universe, 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 humanity forward.
Ifans and Maxwell Martin will be joined by a star-studded ensemble who PBS viewers will recognize, including:
- Solly McLeod (Tom Jones) plays Sasha, a reckless cosmonaut who has yet to live up to his potential.
- Agnes O'Casey (Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light) portrays Irina, a recent addition to the surveillance department at Star City.
- Alice Englert (Dangerous Liaisons) is Anastasia, an untested female cosmonaut in the Soviet Space program.
- Adam Nagaitis (The Responder) plays Valya, a highly respected cosmonaut with the Soviet Space program.
- Josef Davies (The Hunt for Raoul Moat) is Sergei, a brilliant engineer at Soviet Ground Control.
- Ruby Ashbourne Serkis (Shardlake) plays Tanya, a cosmonaut's wife who struggles with the confined nature of life in Star City.
Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald D. Moore are the creative team behind Star City. Nedivi and Wolpert are the showrunners, and both men are executive producers alongside Moore, Maril Davis, Steve Oster, and Andrew Chambless.
There's no release date for the new spin-off yet, but Seasons 1-4 of the flagship series For All Mankind are currently streaming on Apple TV+, and we highly recommend checking them out.
