Is anyone watching this? After buying a new MacBook Pro, I received a free one year subscription to Apple TV, so I watched the first episode last night. The series is a "What if" scenario if the space race had a different outcome. It was OK but not wonderful. I can't quite put my finger on it...maybe some of the writing is not great or they are trying too hard to force a message? I'll keep watching, I guess, since the subject is interesting.
Believe me, I'm no fan of Apple, but my MacBook solved all of my streaming and hi-res woes, so that's all good.
I’m two episodes in and I like it a lot. I’m a sucker for movies such as First Man or anything dealing with the space program, so this is right up my alley. I like the alternate reality premise of the show, and the surprise ending of episode two was a clever twist that sets up some interesting possibilities.
I thought you were schnitzerphilip when I read the title. Except his thread would be Apple HomePods For All Mankind.
I'm enjoying it quite a bit. The "alternate history" ideas are interesting -- Teddy Kennedy becomes President (though it does not go well), the Apollo program goes well into the late 1970s, lots of women become astronauts, Nixon settles the Vietnam War, the ERA amendment is passed, etc. -- but the first few episodes are slow. But boy, does it pick up by show 5 or 6. I can't reveal any spoilers, though... Spoiler I was half-expecting that crazy astronaut to take his helmet off on the surface of the moon to kill himself...
Naw, this was all revealed in the promos, all superficial background to the actual space program. The real intrigue is in the soap opera of the lives of the astronauts. And there's some rough drama there.
Hi Bob! The show is not perfect (some pacing issues) but i like it a lot. It's like a mix between The Right Stuff, Apollo 13 and The Man in the High Castle.
I like that quite a lot, I like movies or TV series about alternate futures like The Man In The High Castle. And I've also been very interested on the Space Program. It amazes me how the US managed to get to the Moon with 1960's technology, I think the computers they had at NASA at the moment has less computational power than a current cell phone, something that makes the Space Program even more amazing and interesting to me.
On the other hand, it was completely debugged - very possibly the only operating system and accompanying programs that had every single bug squashed.
I agree. The movie First Man does a great job of taking you inside the 1960s space capsules and showing how primitive the technology was. There were no touch screens, and few, if any, video monitors. It was largely toggle switches and analog instruments. That more astronauts didn’t die in the process of putting a man on the moon with 1960s technology is a miracle. And that we pulled it off with 1960s technology makes it even more frustrating that we didn’t follow up in the 1970s and establish a permanent base on the moon, as we see in the alternate reality of this show. I have really enjoyed this show, in particular the episode where Spoiler the female astronaut (Molly? Cobb) discovers ice in the Shackleton crater. Certainly a hokey Hollywood aspect to that plotline: even with the pressure of topping the Russians, I doubt NASA ever would have let astronauts wing it like that, however, it was moving and inspiring nonetheless.
I loved the finale last night. Once again, the scenes in outer space perhaps pushed the limits of plausibility, but one thing I love about this genre is watching astronauts and the NASA support staff on the ground use their smarts to solve seemingly impossible problems. Along that line, Ellen’s speech at the end explaining why we go to space was inspiring. The plot about her secret and the tension between that secret and her career as an astronaut is well done, and heartbreaking. Very excited about season 2, especially in light of: Spoiler the post-credits scene where we jump forward to 1983 and see NASA launching a nuclear reactor? to the moon to expand the Jamestown base. I wonder if they’ll jump forward to a whole new, or partially new, cast of astronauts, as nine years will have passed. At the very least, one would think Ed and Gordo may have aged out of the program, although if they sent Deke into space, maybe they’ll send more senior citizens into space. I’d love to see this series continue forward to a manned base on Mars. The production values of the scenes in space throughout this season were amazing. Very believable scenes on the surface of the moon, like watching a big budget Hollywood movie every week.
I saw the first 5 episodes. It was getting better and better. Still nowhere near the level of Mad Men, covering the same period, in terms of the writing/direction/acting. I think the moon scenes were done very well but the sets seemed quite modest.
I don’t see the comparison to Mad Men, which covered the era from roughly 1960 to 1969, and For All Mankind, which begins in 1969 and continues through 1974. Where Mad Men did cover the first stirrings of women’s lib through the characters of Peggy and Joan, For All Mankind gives us female astronauts. Not every period drama is the same as every other period drama. If this show is like any other recent show, it’s more like The Man In The High Castle, which covers the same 1960s era, but presents an alternate reality from the one we know - the Axis powers won World War II, the Soviet Union beat us to the moon.
It reminds me more of Mad Men but you're right that it presents an alternate reality. The way Peggy and Joan become figureheads in the ad business by the end of Mad Men seemed like the kind of theme FAM was going for with "Nixon's Women" and some other episodes.
My jaw dropped when Spoiler the astronaut on the moon killed the Russian astronaut in cold blood. The show had been only mildly interesting up to that point, but I thought that was a fairly gut-wrenching sequence. This show builds very slowly, but good god, the last two episodes have been grim and scary and far more emotional than I ever thought they could be. Many years ago, I can recall being scared spitless by the thought of being the guy in 2001 who goes spinning off into space, oxygen line cut, just going and going forever until you freeze to death. I think this show dramatizes this even better and makes the danger and risk horrifyingly real. Yes, there is a "documentary" style to the proceedings that makes it a little light on the drama. I think once the whole saga of astronaut Ed Baldwin's son on Earth started happening, the show took on a whole new tone. I have to say, the whole thing feels very "real" to me, but I don't dispute that they could amp up the drama just a bit more to engage the audience better. There's "real," there's "accurate," and then there's "dramatic," and I think a little more of the latter would be more entertaining for a mass audience to watch. I'm not saying a Saturn V has to blow up on the pad every other week, but still...
I finally got caught up with the series. The giant rocket in the stinger after the end of episode 10 was a real design called the Sea Dragon. Sea Dragon (rocket) - Wikipedia
