We are still making sense of the rules that govern current media. A decade and a half ago, when new television came to us via a modest number of “linear” channels, it was not hard to keep a handle on what the world was and was not watching. Expensive TV series would arrive amid a flurry of parallel media coverage. If the show was a hit it would survive. If it did not do well then it would be sent to the conservatory with a bottle of gin and a loaded revolver. You may not have watched every grand enterprise. But you knew they existed.
The current – what is the collective noun? – menu-screen of streaming services is so busy that even contemporary epics get swallowed up in the morass. Consider Apple TV+’s For All Mankind. The show has received not a single Emmy nomination. (A promotional app got some recognition, but that just makes the slight more conspicuous.) Its memes have yet to take over Twitter. The actors are not being asked on to Dancing with the Stars. Yet this is a show conceived on an enormous scale that makes evangelical devotees of its regular viewers. As the third season progresses to a tense completion and confirmation of a fourth arrives, For All Mankind finally seems to be getting the credit it deserves. But it’s been a rocky road.
Co-created by Ronald D Moore, a Star Trek veteran who also developed the acclaimed reboot of Battlestar Galactica, For All Mankind works extraordinary alternative history from an apparently modest premise. What if the Soviet Union sprang a surprise and landed on the moon just before Apollo 11 left the launch pad? The series’ wider answer is that, rather than petering out in the mid-1970s, the space race would have continued to deliver bases on the moon, a landing on Mars and… well, we shall have to see where season four brings us.
That alteration – something more than a butterfly effect – creates further peripheral deviations from recent history as we know it. John Lennon survives an assassination attempt. Margaret Thatcher does not. (Mind you, news footage of a burning car suggests she may have perished in a separate attack to the Brighton hotel bombing.) Lennon’s survival aside, rock music seems to progress along a largely unaltered timeline. For good or ill, Soundgarden, Supergrass and Tears for Fears still appear in the expected time frames.
Not all shifts are equally plausible. It does seem likely that continued investment in the space programme would bring some technologies more quickly to American homes. In contrast, it feels like utopian wish fulfilment to suggest that Nasa would respond to the USSR landing a woman on the moon by instituting near-total gender equality within a few short years. As the series begins, Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) is one of the few women in the control room, and her success is often snidely put down to friendship with the real-life rocket pioneer Werner Von Braun (Colm Feore). By the series’ mid-1970s, with many women in space and as many in senior positions on the ground, this elite corner of the US has overcome gender barriers still stubbornly present in the real 2020s. Valentina Tereshkova went to space in 1963. The US made no such response then.
No matter. That shift allows speculation about a better world and permits the promotion of as many empowered women as male characters. Sarah Jones plays the media-friendly, sometimes reckless astronaut Tracy Stevens. The older, craggier Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger), though based on the pioneering aviator Jerrie Cobb, comes across as a distaff Chuck Yaeger. Krys Marshall offers stability as the sober African-American astronaut Danielle Poole. The characters interweave over decades in a drama that balances breakneck space action with a pleasing strain of high-end soap opera.
The series’ relationship with our own time becomes more loose and complex as the show proceeds. In opening episodes, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin eventually make their journey during Richard Nixon’s first term. In later series, real and fictional politicians (no spoilers) displace the presidents in the history books.
“Now we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve seen potentials for what’s past season seven. I could see what season eight is, and nine,” Ronald D Moore told Collider recently. Successive seasons have, so far, jumped forward a decade at a time. If that plan is followed, For All Mankind, currently in the 1990s, will eventually pass us out and speculate about an alternative future. The current characters, some looking a bit wiggy in series three, will retire and a new generation will take their place.
That is assuming For All Mankind lasts so long. Many are the series that have ended before their time. The Leftovers and Deadwood are just two of the 21st century shows still mourned by those discerning viewers who watched when millions did not. The streaming revolution has, however, changed the dynamics. With excellent shows such as Slow Horses, Severance and Black Bird, Apple TV+ has, though less stacked with content than Netflix, demonstrated a hit rate that no competitor can quite match. Such are the voodoo economics of the new world that we can’t tell how For All Mankind is doing. Streamers release no meaningful viewing figures. But the show does now seem to have greater visibility, and the confirmation last week that season four is a goer shows a certain amount of confidence.
“They are very happy,” Moore said of Apple. “I was pleasantly surprised and pleased that people at the top, I’m not going to name names, but people at the top of the Apple corporate ladder are fans of the show. You know? And they’ve told me how much they like the show personally. And I’m always, sort of, ‘Wow, holy cow, that’s really cool’. The audience is built over time, and it built kind of steadily over the first two seasons.”
If the present standard is maintained, For All Mankind deserves to progress deep into its own 21st century. Few other shows manage such breathless tension. None has such fun critiquing modern history. Just one problem. Where they going to find their contemporaneous pop music for the episodes set in 2035 or 2045? Will they dare speculate on how a septuagenarian Supergrass might sound?
For all Mankind streams on Apple TV+
