From Wired.com ...


For All Mankind Is the Best Sci-Fi of Its Era
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The Apple TV+ alternate history series is simply more
ambitious and thought-provoking than its contemporaries.

New Star Wars, new Star Trek, Russian Doll, Severance -
these days sci-fi fans face an embarrassment of riches.
On Friday, they will get even more with the return of
For All Mankind, the ambitious, surprisingly effective
alternate history series from Apple TV+ that also
happens to be one of the greatest science fiction shows
of the modern TV era.

Now in its third season, For All Mankind started with a
simple question: What if the Americans weren't first to
put a man on the moon? From that premise, though, it has
built something far more complex: a show that combines
political intrigue, military brinkmanship (aka a lunar
standoff between American and Russian forces), and a
space race that eventually lands on the surface of Mars.

But as much as the show, unsurprisingly cocreated by
Battlestar Galactica and Trek producer Ronald D. Moore,
can get wonky and gleefully trope-y, its success doesn't
lie in the verisimilitude of the faux NASA hardware or
brilliance of its space scenes. Instead, it's the fact
that Moore and his cohort opted to treat the entire show
like a grand workplace drama; Mad Men, but for NASA.

Much like Mad Men was a commentary on the con of the
American dream disguised as 1960s nostalgia porn, For All
Mankind examines human exceptionalism through the lens of
human failures.

Not that For All Mankind wants for action - the rocket
misfire and subsequent rescue of Apollo 24 at the end of
the first season is everything good about Alfonso Cuaron's
Gravity and then some - it just doesn't make that the main
attraction. It doesn't hide lousy writing under a veneer
of VFX. Instead, like Mad Men was a commentary on the con
of the American dream disguised as 1960s nostalgia porn,
Mankind examines human exceptionalism through the lens of
human failures.

True, redefining the boundaries of the final frontier is
much different than running an advertising agency, but the
parallels remain. Matthew Weiner's AMC show excelled
because it demonstrated that the people controlling the
narrative of the ideal mid-century American life - ad execs
- were complicated, messy. Their visions, hollow. Mankind
does the same, showing that those entrusted with humanity's
hopes for a better life often struggle to simply improve
their own.

These issues with romantic relationships, professional
boundaries, and personal morals make the fantastical,
science fiction stuff all the more poignant. It's one thing
to watch someone find ice on the moon for the first time,
but it's another to watch someone it feels as if you know
do it. (And when she's being assisted by another television
friend, all the better, especially when they don't
necessarily get along and you get to enjoy the ensuing
fireworks.)

For All Mankind does what the best science fiction has
always done: humanize all the abstract ideas that serve as
the genre's foundation. It makes arguments for why space
exploration is important and for the impact it can have here
on Earth, but it does so through a prism of the familiar.
For All Mankind's victory is transforming the science fiction
genre into, as Star Trek once famously put it, a human
adventure.


<https://www.wired.com/story/for-all-mankind-best-sci-fi-show/>

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