THE first two episodes of sci-fi drama series Star City air on May 29, with a weekly release scheduled until July 10.
The alternate history retelling takes its viewers back to the key moment in the 20th-century space race, which was a competition between the Cold War’s two rivals, the United States and the Soviet Union, to achieve superior spaceflight capability.
While originally accomplished by American astronaut Neil Armstrong, the propulsive paranoid thriller showcases a different timeline where the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon, exploring the story from the perspective of the Soviet space programme.
The show serves as a spinoff to the Apple TV series For All Mankind (2019 to 2024), which depicted what would have happened if the space race, which took place from 1955 to 1991, had never ended.
Unlike For All Mankind, which takes places from 1969 to 2012, the upcoming series will not be ‘jumping a decade each season’ but rather tell a story that is set in the 70s, co-creator and co-showrunner Matt Wolpert noted.
He also expressed his fascination with the Soviet space programme, stating that Star City serves an opportunity to tell a very different story than the main show.
“Being in the world of this Cold War paranoid thriller was really an exciting, different challenge for us. Telling the story of these cosmonauts and engineers, who all lived in this isolated city and were together with the intelligence officers monitoring their phone calls and listening to every conversation – we’re capturing that sense of paranoia and not knowing who to trust,” he said in an interview.