TV Review: For All Mankind

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Plot: Imagine a world where the global space race never ended. This “what if” take on history from Ronald D. Moore spotlights the lives of NASA astronauts—the heroes and rock stars of their time—and their families.

Review: Of the four series launching Apple TV+ this Friday, For All Manking has always felt like the series with the biggest potential to be the best. With Battlestar Galactica's Ronald D. Moore running things, there was no doubt that this story of an alternate history of NASA landing on the Moon could be anything but great, right? While the cast looks good and the production values are high, For All Mankind is very slowly paced and feels less like an event series than one treading water to fill a requisite number of episodes. In fact, the twists that change how the landmark Space Race happened are more arbitrary than exciting.

Of the ten episodes in this limited series, eight were made available for this review. Having seen them all, I can say with certainty that this was a hard show to get through, especially from a binge standpoint. Since Apple TV+ will premiere their series weekly rather than dropping them all at once, Netflix-style, it may be easier to consume, but I doubt it. Each episode pushed the sixty minute mark and often crosses it. It also takes a lot of energy to stay focused on the multiple subplots and stories that are weaved together, especially in the opening episodes. It takes at least five hours before the plot begins to resemble anything truly intriguing and for a show kicking off a new service, that is not a good thing.

So let's talk about that revisionist history angle. For All Mankind supposes that the USSR lands on the Moon first and puts the United States at a disadvantage in the Space Race. With the Apollo missions ready to go, we drop in to find the various members of NASA weighing what it means to give up or to persevere. While real historical figures like Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, and Buzz Aldrin are key to the story, the focus is primarily on the fictional ones. Led by astronaut Edward Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), NASA continues their goal of landing on the Moon as planned. There are some changes to how Neil Armstrong makes his historic landing that are meant to add some drama to the mix, but it misses the mark entirely.

From the trailers for the series, we knew that there would be the conceit that NASA decides to change the focus of the Space Race by sending an all female astronaut crew to the Moon. While many of you may scoff at this as being a liberal agenda taking over the red-blooded history and changing it to appease a demographic, I can assure you that the series never takes advantage of this change. While one of the female astronauts is married to someone scrubbed from going to the Moon themselves, Moore and the writing staff never goes beyond the cliches we have seen countless times in similar story dynamics. There is also a subplot involving a Mexican family crossing into the United States that feels tacked on because it never really feels vital to the main story. There are so many subplots in For All Mankind that it becomes common to forget one was even happening until it is tidily resolved to make room for another thread.

The first episodes of the series are directed by Seth Gordon (PIXELS), an unlikely choice for such a dramatic project given his resume with other entries helmed by TV veterans like Sergio Mimica-Gezzan and Meera Menon. The work her is never flashy and fails to really do much to elevate the material, but there are some interesting choices. At least in the first episodes there is a lot of archival footage of Richard Nixon used along with fictionalized audio recordings to give the effect that there is some historical documentation of these alternate events. But that is eventually dropped and the rest of the show feels more like a reenactment from a History Channel docu-series rather than a series worth investing in. 

For All Mankind is not bad but it also isn't anything revolutionairy either. There are so many attempts to make this show seem vital by changing the course of history so that we don't know what is coming next, but we always do. At it's best, For All Mankind feels like a mash-up of HIDDEN FIGURES and APOLLO 13 but the drama both of those films were able to convey in a couple of hours fails to materialize in eight hours of this long form story. If this series premiered on any other service or network, it would be looked at as an intriguing yet middling experiment but as one of Apple TV+'s launch programs, it is disastrously bland. If you are someone interested in the evolution of mankind's journey to the stars, you will find the technical and scientific details here fascinating, but everyone else will be left bored and underwhelmed.

For All Mankind premieres November 1st on Apple TV+.

NASA

GOOD

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