In the years following AMC’s rise from the new kid upstart to the raging hot titan of prestige television, a string of shows attempting to imitate what made exciting programs, like “Mad Men,” and “Breaking Bad” so groundbreaking began airing. Certain shows (“Pan Am,” and “The Playboy Club,” for example) truly strained for greatness, whether through forced period social commentary or other overwrought writing designed to shock and subvert. Apple enters the long-form media race with the launch of “For All Mankind” on Apple TV+. The Streaming Wars have begun; we have lift-off.
“For All Mankind” comes from sci-fi creative mastermind Ronald D. Moore —showrunner of the “Battlestar Galactica” reboot and “Outlander” (Moore was also an instrumental writer on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and its sequel series ‘Deep Space Nine’) and stars Joel Kinnaman in the lead role as astronaut Edward Baldwin. Basically, “For All Mankind” is “First Man” with an alternate reality twist. The first two episodes take their sweet time in setting all the series’ moving pieces up, almost promising a different show than what “For All Mankind,” ends up morphing into in its third hour. After the fallout of the second episode’s unintentionally laugh-out-loud cliffhanger, the series’ grand ambition fully takes shape, with incredibly mixed results.
Heavily reliant on news footage and media voice-over as an exposition device, “For All Mankind,” opens as one might expect; President John F. Kennedy addressing the importance of the American space program to the nation. Cut to Mexico, 1969, where a group of families gather around a small television set with rabbit antennas, bearing witness to a monumental human achievement. In Houston, a crowded bar stands frozen around the same fuzzy, black and white images, watching a landing craft attempting to touch down on the Earth’s orbiting satellite. It all seems quite familiar until all of America is told they must wait for a translation of the first words spoken from the moon; a Marxist-Leninist rally.
Edward Baldwin (Kinnaman) reaches over the bar and grabs a bottle. It was supposed to be him up there planting the flag. But America lost the space race when NASA stopped taking risks after casualties started mounting during flight tests. “That’s why we lost the moon,” Baldwin spews, too drunk to see that the man casually grilling him with questions is a reporter. Baldwin’s dream is now dust thanks to narrow safety margin guidelines, the pilot stuck wondering whether or not he had enough guts to push the envelope when he aborted the landing of the Apollo 10 mission. “You ever think about what you would have said?” someone asks him (the show’s dialog is pretty leaden sometimes).
Both NASA and the Oval Office are furious when an article disparaging the program comes out in the press, with Nixon fuming that Kennedy will use it as fuel to defeat him in the next election. The President doubles down on the program, increasing budgets, expediting old processes, and suggesting they begin training a new type of astronaut, military cosmonauts.
“The Race for the Base” is the United States catchy new media strategy, now promising citizens they will establish a military presence on the moon before the Soviet Union. This idea doesn’t remain Nixon’s top priority for very long though, as finding “an enticing women to be the world’s first moon maiden” (preferably a blonde) soon becomes an obsession he imposes upon NASA’s training team, halting all developments in favor of planting a story for the New York Times liberals. Who the woman is doesn’t even matter. Virtually all the character threads the show has established fade into the background of the third episode, “Nixon’s Women,” the series pivoting to full-on feminist empowerment in the face of adversity narrative.
While we’re all for toppling the patriarchy in an alternate reality (today’s reality would be nice too), is it really logical to suggest that female equality would have advanced substantially more swiftly —especially in intense workplace fields like engineering and astronomy— if the Soviet Union put a man on the moon before the United States? From a writing perspective, the idea feels lazy and implausible. With hindsight, the first two hours of the show do establish kernels to hint that this is where the narrative’s heading —a character named Margot (Wrenn Schmidt) who is clearly better at her job than men who undermine her, for example, has ambitions of being the first woman in flight control— but, the first two hours are mainly about Baldwin and the boys brooding in bars.
For all its issues, Apple certainly spared no expense on the production values (the series’ look does owe a lot to “First Man,” though). The show looks amazing, has vibrant cinematography, robust montage work, and strong period design (although, apparently every dude at NASA drives an expensive sports car that looks the same). Go-to TV composer, Jeff Russo, also brings his A-game, but the show’s early rock needle drops are incessantly repetitious. The Mexican family subplot is also extremely disconnected from the main story; 3 episodes into the season, it has zero bearings on the main plot machinations thus far. Kinnaman also nearly disappears entirely when the female Carol Corps arrives in Houston.
Though clearly built on good intentions and very watchable on a formal level, “For All Mankind,” almost plays like a cover song version of a peak-TV blend of “Apollo 13” and “Mad Men,” with a little “Hidden Figures” and “Captain Marvel,” thrown in. How much the feminist bend dominates the direction of the show going forward should be interesting to see, but, at present, the first two episodes feel like Apple trying to show off how much they’re willing to spend on making these programs look like the next big thing. Moore is a ridiculously talented scribe, but he’s tackled these themes throughout his career already, through more original and thought-provoking genre prisms. His new series is by no means a failure, but it’s far more basic than the scope of its ambition suggests. In “For All Mankind’s” case, man and media content’s reach exceeds the overall storytelling imagination. [C+]