For All Mankind is as big and chaotic as space itself. In addition to the seven NASA astronauts and ground staff that the show’s second season primarily focuses on, there’s also the spouses and children, dozens of astronauts in supporting roles, NASA functionaries, politicians, and their opposite numbers in Moscow. For All Mankind draws comparisons to another sprawling upper-middlebrow streaming space epic The Expanse, which itself follows in the footsteps of Game of Thrones with its extensive world-building and intergalactic scope. But at its core The Expanse is a fairly compact drama that focuses on only a few characters, while For All Mankind has sent more people to space than the actual real-world NASA.
But the hardest thing to keep track of isn’t the extensive cast or the fast-moving, heart-pounding plot. (The last two episodes of Season 2, which won’t air until April, comprise two of the most bonkers hours of TV I’ve ever seen. Watching it was like taking a fistful of amphetamines and BASE jumping off Half Dome. This is a compliment.) The most complicated part of For All Mankind is history itself.
The premise of For All Mankind is that the Soviet Union beat the U.S. to the moon in 1969 by a matter of weeks, and instead of the space race coming more or less to an end by the mid-1970s, the discovery of water on the moon heats it up to its greatest intensity ever. The show’s most distinctive feature is its earnest maximalism, not just in terms of characters and plot, but in examining the furthest reaches of its own historical and political world. The Soviets landed on the moon first, not just changing the course of the space race but of history writ large. And we get to see all of those effects.
Beyond the predictable alt-history lunar confrontations, For All Mankind plots out its alternate history in such minute detail that the writers have to keep and update a chart just to make sure they’re following their own timeline correctly. “Our writers’ PA, every time we talk about things in the room, something comes up, and he has to go up and change the timeline,” says cocreator and executive producer Ben Nedivi. “It literally wraps around the room. But the detail of it is great because it makes us feel like we’ve got ourselves covered. Going into the next season, we know who the president is. We’ll even go as far as looking at who’s a candidate, or who would be a NASA administrator, looking at the actual history.”
For All Mankind doesn’t just alter the history of space travel. Ted Kennedy cancels a trip to Chappaquiddick in order to head a Senate investigation into the lunar failure, then beats Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election before losing to Ronald Reagan in 1976. The U.S. pulls out of Vietnam early in order to focus on the Cold War’s new celestial front, and the early inclusion of women in the Apollo program spurs public support for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Some historical figures, from Nixon to Neil Armstrong to Johnny Carson, play background roles. Others, like Wernher von Braun, NASA flight director Gene Kranz, astronaut and NASA executive Deke Slayton, and real-life NASA administrator Thomas O. Paine, become significant characters as this alternate history unfolds. Early in Season 2, Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), first-among-equals of the show’s main characters, meets a young female astronaut with short, dark hair who turns out to be exactly who you might have expected. Later on, aerospace engineer Larry Wilson (Nate Corddry) has drinks in his kitchen with a Republican political operative named Lee, who’s later revealed to be Lee Atwater, the real-life father of American right-wing misinformation. “Part of the fun is, the more you know the era, the more you recognize some of the changes that are happening just in the background, while the foreground of the show is really changing history much more dramatically,” says cocreator and executive producer Ronald D. Moore. “Everyone in the audience knows we don’t have big moon bases, and that there wasn’t a huge Cold War confrontation in space in the 1980s between the two superpowers. So you’re playing around with audience expectation, audience knowledge, and then providing an even deeper dive for people who really know the history of the period.”
That extends to developments completely outside the scope of the show’s primary plot. A season-opening montage catches viewers up with what they missed since the end of the first season. The Miracle on Ice never happened; the 1981 assassination plot against Pope John Paul II succeeded, while John Lennon survived his attempted murder. (Lennon goes on to appear throughout Season 2 as a peace advocate in background news coverage.) “My personal favorite is that Prince Charles doesn’t marry Princess Diana, he marries Camilla,” says executive producer Maril Davis. “That’s what’s so fun about that mini-montage, you really need to break it down, and it’s a fun hidden gem to look for.”
Those subtle historical in-jokes are fun for the audience—and perhaps even more fun for the writers—but are merely seasoning for the bigger challenge: creating an alternate history that not only serves the plot but rings true to an audience peppered with space obsessives and history buffs. And unlike other recent alternate history shows, like Watchmen and The Man in the High Castle, there’s no source material to fall back on.
Both Moore and cocreator and executive producer Matt Wolpert cited that challenge as one of the project’s big selling points. “One of the things we were most excited by was the open road of it all,” says Wolpert. “Ben and Ron and I are insane history buffs, and so one of the things we had the most fun with was tracking through that butterfly effect. We wrote this document that spans decades of how these little historical changes at the beginning would really snowball into bigger changes.”
And they do snowball, but only to a certain point. The alternate history of For All Mankind tracks closely enough to our own that—without spoiling major plot twists from late in Season 2—the plot intersects with significant real-world historical events from 1983, at least 14 years into the show’s alternate history. “We wanted to keep as close to history as we could for the audience,” Moore says, “because that gives them a sense of ‘Oh, well, I know what’s going on. I understand this world.’”
But as the audience is able to play along—and viewers who paid attention in history class can even anticipate plot points before they appear—For All Mankind also gets to play with the audience’s own knowledge and expectations for dramatic effect. “One thing we love is that when you’re watching our show, you don’t know quite what’s going to happen,” Nedivi says. “Like Apollo 11 [in the series premiere]; there’s a moment there where you’re like, ‘Wait, are they going to kill Neil Armstrong?’ So that idea of watching history in a way that you don’t know the ending? I think it’s exciting.”
But this approach also makes a statement about the way in which history unfolds. On December 28, 1973, in the real world, NASA Mission Control lost contact with the crew of the Skylab space station for 90 minutes. It’s likely, though not certain, that this was the result of a stressed-out and overworked three-man crew temporarily refusing to answer communications, and resulted in a comprehensive redesign of workflows for long-duration space missions. In other words, it was a minor crisis in which a NASA crew might have gone on strike for an hour and a half, with no lasting repercussions.
The astronauts of For All Mankind, on the other hand, disobey orders constantly. Missions are altered, weapons drawn, lives risked and/or saved, all based on personal prerogative and emotional impulse. The actions of individuals matter a great deal in this show, which makes sense given the political context of the space race: Though the common American narrative of the Apollo program is as a triumph of democracy over autocracy, a more honest ideological framework would pit free market policy against planned economics, or individualism against collectivism. By frequently showing its heroes in conflict with, and overcoming, structural roadblocks, For All Mankind embraces this tradition of individual heroism.
At the same time, the alternate history of For All Mankind is incredibly deterministic. The broad contours of the Cold War, at least through Season 2, are generally similar to our own. Historical events unfold the same way in both universes; sometimes on the same day and in the same fashion, sometimes in a different place and time but with the same rhythm and melody. This illustrates the limit of the power of individual decisions, which can divert the material forces of history, but can’t stop them altogether. “Our show is both of those concepts meshed together,” Wolpert says. “It’s about how much impact individuals can have and the structural, societal forces that are not going to change.”
“It didn’t feel like suddenly, everything would be different,” Moore says. “That didn’t seem real. We’re proceeding from one specific event and watching how the angle changes and changes and changes because of that one event. But most of the historical forces and most of the geopolitics are already happening, and already set in motion.”
That means that even the 14-year time span depicted in the first two seasons of For All Mankind is not a long enough runway to produce profound societal change. But as the show goes further into its own timeline—Apple already has ordered a third season—viewers can expect the show’s history to diverge more from our own. For example: Wolpert points out that Ronald Reagan sought the 1976 Republican nomination with Senator Richard Schweiker as his running mate, not George H.W. Bush. When Reagan wins the White House in For All Mankind, Schweicker—not George H.W. Bush—becomes his vice president and heir presumptive for the 1984 Republican nomination. Removing Bush from the ticket would influence every ensuing U.S. presidential election for the next two decades, with profound historical effects down the line.
That means that, as For All Mankind continues, it will mature from the altered stock footage and winks toward our own history, into something more distinct. And it will force the creative minds behind the show to articulate a clear proposition of how their alternate history might unfold. “A lot of [alternate history] shows, I’ve noticed, tend to be a little more dystopian,” Nedivi says. “I think our show, the long run of what we see is a more hopeful future. Obviously it’s not just sunny and optimistic the whole way—we definitely take dark turns. … We’re as excited about the things that change in our alt-history as things that don’t change. You get to tell a story, but we also get to have a lot of fun digging into these little moments, and how those will start to impact things moving into Season 2, and even Season 3.”
So far, For All Mankind has only moderately deviated from our own history. That’s the simplest course to plot, narratively, and it carries the greatest potential to examine underexplored facets of American history, or just to make fun in-jokes. But as this new timeline has a chance to grow, the show’s creators will have both the opportunity and the responsibility to steer away from what we know, and to make even more pointed commentary on history and society. The further For All Mankind gets from its origin, the more interesting the alternate history becomes.