As you might recall, earlier this year I threw in the towel on Apple's sci-fi drama For All Mankind, a show I once loved so much that I put its second season atop my list of the best TV of 2021. The series had badly struggled to come up with interesting second- and third-generation characters to succeed the original ensemble of Apollo astronauts, and too many of the conflicts on and around the Mars colony were being driven by people I found boring and/or inscrutable. My podcast co-host Kathryn VanArendonk suggested I try watching this season's sixth episode, which featured a crew of astronauts landing on Titan. For a few scenes involving that story, I started feeling the old tingles I got from the first few FAM seasons. But any time the action cut back to Mars, all my excitement immediately fizzled. I did not resume watching from there.
Alan Sepinwall
So I went into Apple's new FAM spinoff Star City with wariness at best. The idea of retelling this alternate-timeline story — where the Russians beat America in putting men on the moon, triggering an endless space race — from the Soviet point of view had some intrigue built in. But FAM had lost the thread. On top of that, since FAM is already in the 2010s, telling a story that begins in 1969 invites a lot of potential prequel difficulties.
The good news is that I felt substantially more engaged by Star City than I have by the parent show the last couple of seasons, and there are clear ways the spinoff differentiates itself from its predecessor besides the setting. The bad news is that Star City has some flaws, some systemic to this creative team (like FAM, it was developed by Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi), some specific to this idea and how it's executed.
Let's hit the key points: