November 2019 to present. There's about a season and a half worth of really good TV in this speculative fiction series, co-created by Ron Moore (of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and DEEP SPACE NINE fame), Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi, which postulates a world where the Soviets beat the U.S. to the moon in 1969 and thus keep the space race running strong for decades afterward. Unfortunately, FOR ALL MANKIND is now in its fourth season, and its smattering of interesting and sometimes stirring moments remain mired in frustratingly erratic pacing (especially in the third season), an aggravating amount of truly shameless melodrama, and character conflicts that are too often driven by contrivance rather than personality.
The strongest moments are near the beginning, where the Soviet landing of a female cosmonaut on the moon triggers a frantic scramble to put an American woman into space — a storyline that also serves as a tribute to real-life pilot Jerrie Cobb (fictionalized as Molly Cobb and played by Sonya Walger, second from left below), who died in 2019 — and the political recriminations about the American space program's supposed timidity snowball into a series of deadly accidents.
If you like movies like THE RIGHT STUFF and APOLLO 13, the premise is hard to resist, but the further the show gets from the period where it begins, the clumsier it gets, and the more facile its simple-minded politics become. (The first season's apologia for Wernher von Braun's use of Nazi slave labor was quite bad enough, but did the second season really need to valorize Ronald Reagan? In what universe was it defensible for the third season to have Don't Ask, Don't Tell invented by a closeted lesbian Republican and her awful closeted beard husband, or to make the show's obvious Melon Usk pastiche a self-made Black billionaire (played by Edi Gathegi) whose family is from Kenya, rather than a wealthy white South African whose popularity and predatory impulses are inseparable from that background? Why does the show's vision of the Soviet Union more closely resemble the 1982 Clint Eastwood techno-thriller FIREFOX than the historical USSR?) The show also never really recovers from the eventual loss of key members of the original ensemble, in particular Gordo and Tracy Stevens (Michael Dorman and Sarah Jones, pictured above center), who depart at the end of the second season.
A central dilemma with FOR ALL MANKIND is that the storyline covers four decades of alternate history, and the terrible pacing and frequent time-skips make it difficult to sustain any kind of emotional connection to the characters. Even if you're really invested in certain characters' relationships, you have to resign yourself to the fact that they may only have one scene together once every 15 or 20 years of story time — and in the meantime, you'll have to put up with a depressing amount of Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) being insufferable to Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall), who has the misfortune of being one of this very white show's only recurring Black characters. The current season, set in the early '00s, is still struggling for a coherent story direction, suggesting the series may be running out of gas.
I dunno — I really liked this show at its outset, but the longer it goes on, the harder it becomes to accept its many flaws, and the current season has repeatedly made me wonder why I'm still bothering.
