Star City Review

I was wary of starting Star City, the spin-off of AppleTV+’s For All Mankind for two reasons. The first was that the mothership had gone from being one of the best shows on television in its first and season seasons (seriously, that second season is an all-time great, especially the finale) to falling off a cliff in its third and never recovering in its fourth and fifth seasons (it’s set to end after its upcoming sixth season). And the second reason? Star City, named after the Soviet compound that housed the Soviet space program, was going to be heading back in time and covering ground that was originally addressed back in season one of For All Mankind, just from the Soviet perspective. So, really, how interesting would it be to see a lot of the same major plot points just from the opposite side of things? Well, I’m here to let you know that despite some rocky moments early in the series, Star City is trending more toward the successes of early For All Mankind rather than the mess that the series has become.

Star City does offer the Soviet POV on major moments in the For All Mankind alternate timeline*, but unless you’ve memorized huge swaths of season one of that series, there’s more than enough other plot points outside of the space travel of it all to keep you interested. And yes, you can definitely watch Star City if you haven’t watched For All Mankind, so long as you take a few minutes to learn the key differences between what has happened in that universe that differentiates it from ours (see my note below for that primer). And yes, the series also does that annoying thing of having a cast of Brits (and some Irish actors) portray all the Russians, complete with using their natural accents, despite having all the text shown appear in Cyrillic – one of my pet peeves is having characters be British when they’re French, or German, or Russian simply because we need them to speak English and we don’t want to ask someone to try to put on what will likely be a ghastly accent.** But, after a couple of episodes, you can start to overlook the Britishness of it all and just accept the series for what it is: A spy drama in the midst of a space race.

*The central question of For All Mankind and Star City is “What would have happened if the Soviets made it to the Moon before the Americans?” And from there, an alternative future is born, with certain historical figures surviving assassinations, others succumbing too young, new people winning elections, and a space race that never ends as the Soviet Union continues on past its end point in our timeline.

**Notably, there aren’t any American actors using American accents in the series, since the Americans are the villains in Star City. And since Americans need to remain American for the story to work, we end up with mostly Brits playing Russians – and the occasional non-Brit popping in for other reasons. I will say, I prefer the British accents to a bunch of actors trying and failing to sound Russian and ending up more like Boris and Natasha. But still, could we have gotten a cast of Eastern European actors? We’ve certainly had some stellar ones on For All Mankind over the years.

One of my major issues with the most recent seasons of For All Mankind has been the series more or less abandoning the idea of space exploration in favor of more grounded dramatic storytelling on Mars. The wonder that came with exploration in the early years of the show was one of its greatest assets. Since Star City takes place in the early years of the space race, we get that sense of wonder, the race for greatness, and struggle to one-up the enemy in a desire to both push the limits of humanity and claim victory. And, since this is the Soviet Union and everyone is being watched and tracked, there’s the added tension of success keeping one alive and well while failure (or anything outside of the script provided for an individual by the State) potentially leading to a loss of standing or something worse. As we learn early in the series, mistakes are not made in the Soviet Union, and if they are, they are taken care of. Permanently.

What sets Star City apart from For All Mankind, however, is that co-creators Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald D. Moore knew the correct balance right out of the gate with this series. Whereas For All Mankind doesn’t really kick into high gear until the female astronaut program is started in episode four of the series (and the focus on the show’s female characters becomes more and more at the forefront of the writing, turning what was a good show into a great show by season two), Star City puts the women front and center from the jump and keeps them there throughout the five episodes screened for critics. Yes, we get some interesting male characters – chief among them Rhys Ifans’ Chief Designer – but our central villain, Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin, cold, calculating, excellent), the head KGB operative at Star City, is a woman. Our emotional linchpin character, Irina Morozova (an incredibly balanced Agnes O’Casey), who will eventually appear on For All Mankind, is a woman navigating a nascent spy career while trying to help those she believes are innocent. And we spend time with the first woman in space, Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert), as well as Tanya Mironova (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), the wife of a cosmonaut who is chafing under what is expected of her in that role – two very complicated women who are allowed to be complicated.

Star City isn’t a perfect series, but it has a heck of a lot going for it that made me keep pressing play on my screeners. There’s compelling relationship drama – between cosmonauts, romantic partners, political rivals, and friends. There’s the constant threat of the State, breathing down the necks of those who serve it in any capacity. Step out of line and you might not live to see tomorrow, no matter how important you might be to the PR machine. And there’s the real threat of death from the early days of space exploration – something that is acute, but potentially easy to overlook when you know there’s just as much threat to your person back home. I started out my journey with Star City wary of what it could be. But halfway through the season, I’m cautiously optimistic that this could be a truly great series.

Star City is streaming on AppleTV+. Five of the season’s ten episode were provided for critics.