Apple TV’s Star City opens in 1969 with a Soviet cosmonaut becoming the first ever man to walk on the moon, then pulls the camera back to the world that has to live with the victory. The first two episodes stream Friday, and additional episodes arrive weekly through July 10.
Rhys Ifans leads the series as the Soviet space program’s chief designer, with Anna Maxwell Martin as a cold, efficient KGB agent. The show’s opening image is not celebration but control: the cosmonaut’s wife is hauled from her bed by the KGB in the dead of night to watch the landing, while the chief designer receives a special commendation in secret and immediately returns the medal to the government to keep him away from American interests. That kind of pressure, more than the moon shot itself, is what defines the show’s version of victory.
Star City is built as an alternate-history companion to For All Mankind, but its focus is the Soviet side of the space race, where secrecy is the engine of the drama. The series begins in 1969 and is set in the 1970s, with younger versions of Irina Morozova, Sergei Nikulov and Anastasia Belikova appearing in the story. The show is filmed in Lithuania, the characters speak English, and the setup is designed so viewers do not need to have seen the parent series to follow it.
The creative team has said the aim was not to make a direct counterpoint to For All Mankind, but to move into the gaps left behind the Iron Curtain. They were drawn to Soviet space-program stories they found almost hard to believe, and one of the show’s guiding ideas is that the ground can be more dangerous than orbit. That is the friction running through Star City: a space-race triumph that becomes, immediately, a problem to manage.
That tension gives the series its shape today, when Apple TV is using the launch to widen the world of a franchise rather than simply echo it. The first five episodes were made available for review, out of eight total, and the early stretch suggests the show is less interested in replaying a familiar race than in showing what victory costs when the state is watching every move.
Tim Carras, a 2000 graduate of Gateway High School in Monroeville, worked on the visual effects teams for Star City and the most recent season of For All Mankind, a reminder that the series’ Soviet moon landing depends as much on craft as concept. In the end, Star City answers its own premise plainly: the moon landing is the hook, but the real story is the machinery of fear built around it.
