At the beginning of “For All Mankind,” it was the 1960s. By Season 5, which premieres Friday on Apple TV, it’s the 2010s, and the world looks very different.
For one thing, befitting the premise — an alternative history in which the space race gets turbocharged — the world of the story extends beyond Earth: Much of the action now takes place on Mars, where humankind has established a growing colony, having leapfrogged there from a settlement on the moon.
But the setting is very different in another, retro way: Though in many ways human technology on the show is decades ahead of our own, the characters’ relationships with technology are quaintly 20th century.
There are few signs of the agitating, toxic presence of social media, which, by 2012 in our own timeline, was coming into its own. There is little sign of online culture, memes, FOMO. There are what appear to be iPhones (the show is produced by Apple, after all), but people do not spend their time glued to them.
Whether on Earth or Mars, most of the characters’ interactions with technology involve logging on to chunky desktop computers with old-fashioned interfaces, clacking away on keyboards and doing work. People still get news from television (including a Fox News doppelgänger); the glimpses of the internet that we get have a bare-bones, Web 1.0 look.
It is a vision, in other words, of a society with far-future physical technology and a 1990s information environment. It’s not perfect or else there would be no drama: There is dangerous spaceflight, labor exploitation and the threat of war. But from enervated, Earthbound 2026, it can look awfully fun.
“For All Mankind” is a butterfly-effect story. A single fact of history changes — the Soviets land a human on the moon first in 1969 — and a universe of aftereffects follows. The Americans triple down on the space program; eventually there’s a permanent lunar base.
By the later seasons, there is a hotel on the moon, clean nuclear fusion and an international Mars community (“Happy Valley,” not to be confused with the glum British police drama), where residents grow crops under domes and fly about in “hopper” shuttles. Humanity gets a hardware upgrade.
There are also plenty of knock-on social and geopolitical effects. Female astronauts land on the moon alongside men, and this primes America to elect a female president. The United States and the Soviet Union, still around and kicking, are allies. (“Star City,” a spinoff coming in May, will look at the space race from the Soviet side.) John Lennon, for some reason, is not assassinated. Other realities remain unchanged: “Survivor” still exists; so does Nicki Minaj’s “Starships.”
What is conspicuously missing, though, is our ubiquitous, all-consuming, neurotic online culture. Part of this may simply be the setting. The astronauts and scientists who take up much of the focus are too busy to constantly be refreshing Facebook.
But the series, whose creators include Ronald D. Moore (“Battlestar Galactica”), suggests that the butterfly’s wings blew tech in a different direction. In our universe, after the Apollo missions, we pulled back from manned deep-space exploration. Space travel became a thing of publicity stunts and rich-guy hobbies. We didn’t get flying cars; we got the personal computer, the global web, Twitter, A.I.
We know what that’s brought us, good and bad. Information is more ubiquitous and peace more elusive. I recently saw someone post (because social media has broken my brain, I cannot recall where) that if you want to sleep well you should follow the rule that in your bedroom, it is 1996: No screen phones, no tablets, nothing invented since the mid-90s.
In “For All Mankind,” the spacefaring technology is futuristic, yet it sort of feels like it’s 1996 everywhere, even deep space. And it’s oddly comforting.
Maybe this is one reason I greedily binge the screeners of every season as soon as I get them, despite the show’s unevenness. When it’s good, it’s one of the most thrilling adventures on TV. Most seasons start slow, building to a deep-space crisis. This is true in Season 5, where two story lines — a political showdown over control of Mars and a push to explore Saturn’s moon Titan — set up another white-knuckle climax of nerves and derring-do.
The series has also shown the strain of pushing relentlessly into its future. For nearly half a century it has hung on to its original focal character, Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), a hotheaded Apollo astronaut who has prolonged his career into his 80s, with Kinnaman under a crust of aging makeup like a “Saturday Night Live” caricature of Joe Biden.
The show has struggled to develop engaging new characters to replace those who have died or moved on. One exception is Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi), the enigmatic tech entrepreneur who has gained power on Mars through nerdy ingenuity and ruthlessness. (And he managed all that without buying a social-media platform.)
But the show creates an alternative world that you’d want to live in, and that’s a rare thing. Sci-fi has become much more common on TV of the streaming era, but lately it leans dystopian, heavy on alien invasions (“3 Body Problem”), brain implants (“Severance”) and postapocalyptic underground shelters (“Fallout,” “Silo,” “Paradise”).
The dark star in this firmament is “Black Mirror,” which for more than a decade has told unshakable short stories in which people use cybertechnology to alter (or imprison) consciousnesses and transform social relations, creating a hell of commodified brains and sinister screens.
“For All Mankind” instead asks: What if we had spent the past decades directing our genius and treasure toward colonizing the solar system rather than colonizing our minds?
In real life, people disagree on the answer, scientifically and politically. You could see the premise of “For All Mankind” as basically the abundance movement, but for space. Critics of Mars colonization have argued that seeking out a “backup planet” could keep us from fixing problems like climate change. The Trump White House recently put a nationalistic spin on its efforts toward building a moon base: “America will never give up the moon again.”
And the solar system of “For All Mankind” is no kumbaya paradise. In the new season, the infusion of rare-metal resources mined from the asteroids has not led to universal prosperity. The masses on Earth grow resentful of the flow of resources off-planet.
The most timely story line involves a threat to the labor force on Happy Valley of being replaced by computer and robotic “automation.” Conspicuously, the show prefers that term to “A.I.,” to the extent that I wondered if a show on a tech company’s streaming service was reluctant to touch the real-world subject too directly.
But the approach does seem more suited to the show’s hardware-first focus. Even its crises and social upheavals are those of a society that is still centered on building stuff and doing stuff, a culture that is seeking to expand rather than disappear into its smartphones.
Maybe, even in the optimistic alternative timeline of “For All Mankind” — which will conclude after its sixth season — it will turn out humanity cannot ultimately outrun the Singularity. But refreshingly, at least it suggests that we can still hope to reach for the stars.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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