‘For All Mankind’ is the best of Apple TV+’s debut shows — but this space race alternate-history is slow to lift off. Alan Sepinwall’s review
, etc., as crowds gather around the world to watch TV news coverage of the first man to set foot on the moon. But instead of Neil Armstrong, whose own mission is weeks away, it’s Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov . There is still talk of “one small step” signifying something bigger, but those words are spoken in Russian, with all ofIn our reality, the Soviets never came close to landing on the moon ahead of Apollo 11.
The main focus of the first two episodes, though, is on Ed and Gordo’s frustration that they weren’t allowed to land on Apollo 10, and on the impact Ed’s public discussion of that frustration has on his career. Among the series’ bigger problems is that its two main characters are bland compendiums of clichés from every other story about the space race.
Not coincidentally, things perk up a lot in the third hour, “Nixon’s Women,” which features a big deviation: to court the women’s liberation vote, Nixon orders NASA to induct and train a class of female astronauts. It’s cynical rather than enlightened — one administrator explains that they’d prefer a pretty one, because “We need Marlo Thomas, not Danny Thomas!” — but it still raises that glass ceiling to the moon, and possibly beyond.
That episode’s a winner, as are the ensuing ones that diverge most from history. But the show still seems torn between heading off in bold new directions and simply playing the NASA greatest hits: triumphant slow-motion walks, anxious loved ones watching on TV, and so on. The show’s reality grows more different from our own as time goes on, but at such a slowly escalating rate as to make the thought exercise behind it feel too abstract.
In May of 1961, President Kennedy announced a desire to put an American on the moon before the end of the Sixties. It took NASA more than eight years to make that wish a reality, with a lot of trial and error along the way.
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