The best sci-fi series on TV isn’t the one everyone’s watching

Good sci-fi shows are pretty plentiful these days. Apple has scored hits with series like Severance and Pluribus, and of course everyone is eager to see how Stranger Things will wrap up over on Netflix.

But just because they’re the most popular sci-fi shows currently on TV doesn’t mean they’re the best. In fact, there’s one series that’s easily as good or better than any of them, but which doesn’t get talked about nearly enough.

For All Mankind is fantastic

A masterpiece in the making

For All Mankind was created by Matt Wolpert, Ben Nedivi, and Ronald D. Moore, the latter of whom had a big hand in reviving Battlestar Galactica in the 2000s as well as creating Outlander. It’s about an alternate history where the United States and the Soviet Union never stopped competing in the space race. The first season is set in the late 1960s, when just getting to space is still an accomplishment. Each season after that jumps ahead a number of years, until in season four, humanity has built a research center on Mars. In a stinger at the end of the fourth season, we jump ahead in time again and see that we’ve built a mining facility on an asteroid. The year is 2012.

One of the subtlest touches in For All Mankind is how, as the seasons pass, we notice more and more modern technology popping up earlier in time. The logic is that the original space race helped us develop technologies like GPS and MRIs, so if it kept going, who’s to say we couldn’t have video calls in the 1990s as they do on For All Mankind? At its core, the show is about celebrating these kinds of leaps in human ingenuity and achievement.

To anchor us, we’re introduced to a wide variety of characters. One of the mainstays is Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), who starts the show as a NASA astronaut and may end it as one of the galaxy’s first Martians. His wife (Shantel VanSanten) and daughter (Cynthy Wu) also play crucial roles. One of the juiciest arcs belongs to Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), an engineer who eventually becomes the head of NASA before things take a turn in season 4, after which it looks like she’s going to exit the story.

That’s another remarkable thing about For All Mankind: just because a character is important doesn’t mean they’ll stick around for the entire run. The story spans decades, after all, and people naturally cycle in and out of it over that time. The show’s willingness to let characters come and go as needed makes it feel alive in a way that a lot of shows don’t.

For All Mankind is criminally underwatched

Be the change I want to see in the world

Like most streaming services, Apple doesn’t reveal viewership figures unless it wants to, so it’s hard to say exactly how many people are tuning into For All Mankind. We can assume that viewership is decent, at least. After all, the show has put out four fantastic seasons, a fifth is on the way (hopefully in 2026), and the creators have in mind six to seven seasons before everything is said and done. Plus, Apple is making a spinoff called Star City that retells some of the same events in this fictionalized space race, but from the Soviet side of things. For All Mankind could become Apple’s first home-grown franchise, and I assume they wouldn’t make that swing if it weren’t pulling decent numbers.

But I know it’s not pulling the kind of numbers it deserves. I know that For All Mankind doesn’t get discussed nearly as much as some of Apple’s other sci-fi shows like Severance, Pluribus, or even Silo. And given how rock solid the series is, that’s a shame.

For All Mankind stands out for how optimistic it is. Right now, with new reports coming out all the time about generative AI potentially taking jobs away from human beings, technology can seem a little scary, but For All Mankind posits a future where humans take bold leaps into the unknown, where we work through our differences to create a better, brighter future. That doesn’t mean there isn’t conflict — in fact, there’s rather a lot, and the show does a great job of sketching out what a clash between two science-obsessed superpowers might look like — but For All Mankind has a buoyant spirit that keeps things from ever dragging too much.

Is there anything bad about For All Mankind?

Let’s pick some nits

Okay, that’s enough of me slobbering over the show. There are a few drawbacks. While the sci-fi drama is generally very interesting and on point, there are a few earthbound storylines that feel a little too soap operatic for their own good. For All Mankind wants to be a speculative fiction drama and a character study, and I think it’s slightly better at the former. But the show is always moving onto the next development, so these amount to little more than bumps in the road.

I genuinely don’t know where the show is going next. In the fourth season, the technology behind space travel had advanced to the point where private space flights were becoming possible, which threw a wrench into the established order. (And yes, there is an Elon Musk alternative, if you’re wondering.) For All Mankind has pretty much caught up with our current world. Next season, I expect it to start speculating about our future, and that has me very intrigued.

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Where does Mankind go next?

As a streaming service, Apple TV+ specializes in sci-fi. For All Mankind was one of the first original shows on the network, and it’s still one of the best. Even in what promises to be a crowded year for sci-fi, I’m hoping For All Mankind breaks out and becomes the popular phenomenon it deserves to be.