‘For All Mankind’ checks all the boxes of great TV
It’s 1992, and the solar system’s first space hotel is about to open. A woman is running for president. The United States, the Soviet Union and a private corporation are in a three-way race to land astronauts on Mars.
At least, that’s what’s happening in the 1992 of Apple TV+’s stunning “For All Mankind” (streaming Fridays; ★★★★), an alternate history drama that imagines that the 1960s space race between the U.S. and the USSR never ended.
Now in its third season, the series rockets to a Mars-centric version of the 1990s where the timeline is different but still feels a bit like the ’90s we know.
“Mankind” is the rare series that’s exciting, emotional, tense, dramatic, heartbreaking, elating and infuriating all at once. Some TV shows are good, some are great, and still others remind me why I became a critic. And in the endless barrage of mediocre series pushed out weekly, “Mankind” stands out, a shining star (or moon or planet) among the replaceable rest.
Season 3 opens nearly a decade after the second season, which was set in 1983, with most of the main characters donning aging makeup and wigs that vary drastically in quality but still are fun.
Karen Baldwin (Shantel VanSanten) is now a rich corporate executive after she helped create a company that lets ordinary (but wealthy) people travel to space. Her ex-husband Ed (Joel Kinnaman) waits to hear if he or his fellow astronaut Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) will lead NASA’s first manned mission to Mars,
Elsewhere, former astronaut Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour) mounts a presidential campaign as a Republican, NASA chief Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) is an unwitting asset for the KGB, and a new generation of engineers and astronauts begins to take over NASA, including Karen and Ed’s adopted daughter Kelly (Cynthy Wu) and Margo’s protegé, Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña).
One of the big joys of Season 3 is the many payoffs from the groundwork laid by the writers in the first two seasons. Aleidais now a married mother and senior engineer at NASA. And each butterfly-effect change from real history that makes up the alternate timeline of the series has the potential for inside jokes.
A montage that opens the new season, recapping the previous decade, reminds the audience that in this timeline, John Lennon never was assassinated and the Beatles get to have a reunion tour.
It’s not just the alternate history that makes “Mankind” great. What’s special is the way the writers craft scenes that are so expertly written, so intense that you might need to recover at the end of an episode. The series mixes genres with ease and logic. Each episode is a gratifying surprise.
The surprises aren’t confined to TV’s usual tropes of death, pregnancies and breakups. “
There is one flaw that‘s hard to overlook but is offset by the greatness of everything around it.
The writers chose to take the least popular and most vexing storyline from Season 2, in which Karen had an affair with the teenage son of her best friend, and make it even more prominent in Season 3.
That kid, Danny Stevens (Casey W. Johnson) is now an adult and astronaut, and winning the race for the most annoying TV character since Julie on “Friday Night Lights.”
But when the sum of a series is so good, it’s easy to write off one bad character (and that’s a hint to the writers).
“Mankind” is the most thoughtful and thought-out show on TV, so nuanced and exquisite that you forget where and when you’re living and who’s president. It’s in a class all its own; it’s a new frontier of just how good TV can be.