Photo: Apple TV+
FOR ALL MANKIND premieres on November 1 as part of AppleTV+’s initial release. To promote the new series, executive producers Ronald D. Moore, Maril Davis, Ben Navidi, and Matt Wolpert; as well as cast members Shantel VanSanten, Jodi Balfour, Wrenn Schmidt, Sarah Jones, and Michael Dorman met with reporters at New York Comic-Con. Later in the day, the cast and writers reassembled, now joined by Joel Kinnaman, for a panel to discuss the series after a sneak peek of the pilot’s first 16 minutes.
What’s FOR ALL MANKIND all about? Creator Ronald D. Moore related the new series to “a MAD MEN show set at NASA in the ‘70s” that would give viewers “the space program we never got” in an alternate history where, since the United States lost the race to put a man on the moon, NASA didn’t suffer a bunch of budget cuts. Executive producer Maril Davis elaborated on this concept, discussing how the real-life space program “fizzled out” after our big win; but in FOR ALL MANKIND, “by losing the moon, we end up winning in the end.”
What’s one way we win? “Something supposedly bad, like losing the space race, actually ends up aiding social progress in many ways,” according to Jodi Balfour…but not in too many ways.
But none of that exploration can happen without a rich cast of characters. According to Joel Kinnaman, who plays “all-American astronaut” Ed Baldwin, one of the main draws of FOR ALL MANKIND is the series has “eight characters that have incredible arcs,” as opposed to the two or three strong stories that might appear in any other series.
This was by creator Ronald D. Moore’s design. Said Moore, “You have to start with the people—that’s who the audience shows up to watch every week. They don’t really show up to watch my history lesson or really show up to watch the special effects, even; they show up to watch these people that they invite into their homes every week, right? So, it’s always about the character stories; it’s always about their intimate lives, and then you embroider everything else around that.”
So, let’s take a look at some of the series’ key players.
Wrenn Schmidt’s plays Margo Madison, is a “not-so-secret workaholic,” who grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. The fictional Margo’s father was friends with a real legend of space exploration, Wernher von Braun. While Margo’s dad was “absent,” per Schmidt’s description, and caused the character to become “desperate for that kind of human connection,” von Braun “seasoned [Margo’s] potential” in science and engineering, which put her on the path to become the first woman in Mission Control. As one might expect, that path was not always smooth, even in FOR ALL MANKIND’s alternate version of history. For example, she is sometimes seen as “von Braun’s girl,” rather than for the value of her own mind.
Ed Baldwin, said Kinnaman, is a “former test pilot” and “very competitive man,” whose “competitive spirit continues on throughout the show.”
Shantel VanSanten plays Karen Baldwin, who the actress described as “very stubborn and stuck in her ideals and ways.” The character is also “the better half of the relationship that is Ed and Karen together. Because it truly takes both of them in order for him to do his job.”
The Baldwins’ relationship “comes with a lot of challenges because the nature of what [astronauts like Ed] do takes them away from communicating and sharing so much that is secretive, whether it’s because of politics or because of the NASA program; and you’re just there to support and trust in whatever way that you can. But I think that eventually wears” on the spouse who’s left behind. VanSanten called exploring this relationship a “beautiful and rewarding challenge. Ed and other astronauts “may be up in space and no gravity, but it feels like the ones that are left behind have literally the weight of the world on them. And yet, they can’t show it. So, it’s slowly chipping away at—in my mind—this marble statue; and eventually, life kind of unfolds and crumbles.”
FOR ALL MANKIND viewers may think they know what it means to be married to an astronaut, but this series tells a more complicated story in the actress’ eyes: “It’s easy to say, ‘well, she’s an astronaut wife,’ and we just assume we know and understand from previous stories told. But, really, we go so much deeper into the exploration of what grounds the story and how the wife has to mow the lawn, and has to raise the kid, and has to create a stable environment for the husband and astronaut to come home.”
On the opposite side of the relationship spectrum, perhaps having more traditional problems mixed in with those related to the job, Sarah Jones described the dynamic between her character, Tracy Stevens, and Michael Dorman’s Gordo Stevens as the “misfit couple to the very put-together Baldwins—or seemingly put-together Baldwins.” Jones called Tracy a “reluctant astronaut wife,” who has a “unique bond” with her husband and noted that “the Stevenses are very ride-or-die with each other.”
Once FOR ALL MANKIND switches up history, Jones warned that the role reversal may cause Gordo to look at himself and think about how he uses work to help with his vices. Gordo becoming an astronaut “used to be their dream,” but now Tracy can live the dream for herself.
Dorman described the Stevens’ relationship as “kind of rooted in love, and then, Gordo’s sort of a little wayward party boy. It’s amazing that they’re still together when we meet them.” Because Gordo is “a bit of a playboy,” the marriage certainly has its rocky points but will always showcase an interesting dynamic. Said Jones, “they’re never boring. Whether or not that’s a healthy thing is an entirely different conversation… But they both share a lot of common interests, and they’re really…I would say…the only people that can challenge each other. There’s not really many other romantic partners—at least when we’re coming into the story—that could match either of them. I think that’s part of their draw.”
As part of his description of what his character may have in common with Jones’, Dorman explained that neither Gordo nor Tracy can be “in idle,” or else “bad things happen.” Particularly for Gordo, “when he’s in idle, the voices in his head start to get too loud to the point where he’s like, ‘I need a drink. I need to be doing something crazy. Otherwise, I’m going to have to look in the mirror, and I don’t want to do that.’ So, it’s really interesting to put a character like that in the ’60s as an astronaut, where you weren’t allowed to have any faults. You had to be, as Sarah would say, a superhuman. But you couldn’t. You weren’t allowed any faults; and so, it’s interesting to play a character like that, where you’ve got the mask; and then you get to see, as the audience, the truth.”
Jodi Balfour’s character, Ellen Waverly, first appears in FOR ALL MANKIND’s third episode as part of the first call for women astronauts. While growing up in New York, Ellen idolized the great Amelia Earhart and had a poster of the famous aviator on her wall. Before joining NASA, Ellen had been a pilot since her teen years—which was only fitting, having grown up with such a role model. Over the course of the series, Balfour teased, viewers will “get to know Ellen in her personal life in a really profound and meaningful way.”
How women’s lives might be different from what we would envision. One of FOR ALL MANKIND’s biggest historical changes is, of course, the introduction of female astronauts after the Americans’ big space race loss to the Russians. With that development in place, it would be natural to assume some other big changes for women’s lives might be in place…but the series takes a grounded approach. There’s change, but it’s not necessarily radical.
During the press roundtables, Jodi Balfour discussed what it was like to play one of the first female astronauts-in-training: “…in my instance anyway, to be a woman in 1969, 1970, being called to apply to become an astronaut at NASA, when it didn’t happen in real life until the ‘80s…Suddenly, you have women in these positions—including Wrenn [Schmidt]’s character, the first woman in Mission Control—you have women in these positions that, prior to, we associate men holding, and what does that do to society?”
But, at the same time, Balfour and Schmidt both warned, women’s overall experiences wouldn’t be as affected as one might think—or even hope—in FOR ALL MANKIND’s alternate universe.
According to Balfour, “even though there’s this noteworthy difference between when women joined NASA in real life versus when women joined NASA in our show, and elements of social progress, it’s also just…The world is still the world, you know? And there are still the barriers, the stigma, the bias—all of that still plays out in the show. So, even though women come in to NASA, the men don’t like it very much; and even within that, there are gender barriers and resistance that we have to fight, as well as other elements of social progress that…we still have a lot to do. Things like racial barriers, things like sexuality barriers—all of that stuff is dealt with and looked at…[The writers] always say that, even though we tweak history in the show, you might be able to change something a little bit about an event that happens; but ultimately, people are who people are. So, we can change the fact that Anne Smith didn’t go to the store that day, but Anne Smith is still Anne Smith. So, whatever consequences of her behavior might have happened, there are still going to be consequences of her behavior. So, it’s really interesting, that dynamic: There’s that push and pull between taking full creative license and still applying what we all know to be the realities of living in society.”
Schmidt agreed with Balfour’s sentiment. If anything, Margo’s struggles as the first woman in Mission Control will be familiar to modern-day women in certain, male-dominated professions: “Margo’s particular storyline is not all that different, in some ways, from what you look at happening in Silicon Valley now. I think whether it’s 1969 and a woman feeling like she’s being locked out, or kind of pushed to the sidelines because she’s a female, it’s not all that different from what you hear with female engineers, who…there’s still such a small percentage of them…To me, it feels like, in some ways, we’ve made a lot of progress; and in other ways, we haven’t. And I feel like our show kind of follows, in some ways, a similar trajectory—if that makes sense.”
Balancing alternate history with reality. That idea of blending a big change with the known atmosphere in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was vitally important to the production team. As Moore explained, “the alternate history and the real history…that amalgam—that takes time and thought,” which always came back to how it affected the characters.
Moore admitted that this particular type of storytelling required him to do a bit more pre-planning than he was used to, rather than just allowing the story to unfold on its own, “because of the nature of what we are doing. It is a big, historical piece and a big epic that’s spanning many decades, really. So, we had to take some time at the very beginning, just to lay out a big roadmap of how all of this was going to work. Then, each season, you have to do it again and again.” Scripts could be changed along the way, but “once you do that, you then have to follow that thread out and make sure this isn’t…how does this domino forward. So, there’s a lot more intense kind of discussion and sort of making sure that these—all these—pieces line up correctly.”
This was a very different process than what Moore had used on one of his most well-known and beloved projects, BATTLESTAR: GALACTICA. “Battlestar was much more improvisation,” he said. FOR ALL MANKIND, on the other hand is “very closely knitted together” and therefore requires more of a plan.
As executive producer Maril Davis explained, the FOR ALL MANKIND creative team’s mission was to “expand and change” the known moon landing stories “without losing touch” with the stories its “audience has a familiarity with.”
Co-creator, writer, and executive producer Matt Wolpert described the series’ arc as “showing the evolution in alternate history as we go” forward through the events following the Russians’ moon landing. “We started from that point and really thought through, ‘ok, well, what would the snowball effect of that be? What things would change? What things would stay the same?’ And it is a blend of the two,” unlike most alternate histories that might simply jump right in with the change. Wolpert’s writing partner, Ben Navidi elaborated on this concept: “We start—the show literally starts—with that moment of change, and then you’re seeing the evolution and change as it happened.”
Navidi also noted that series’ writers refused to make it easy for viewers or “spoon-feed” them the change. Instead, he warned that there will be a lot of times when viewers would question whether or not something actually happened because the fictional universe is so realistic, and “there are amazing stories from the early days of the space program that were never told—that people don’t even know about—that [FOR ALL MANKIND] brings to life.”
Keeping with the theme of realism, mixed with the Russian moon landing’s butterfly effect, FOR ALL MANKIND will feature some familiar historical figures in new and interesting situations. According to Davis, “we didn’t want to do a typical dystopian drama; we wanted something a little more optimistic, and we also wanted to make sure that we had real moments in history that tethered the audience…We didn’t want to do THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE—which is a great show—we wanted it to be a recognizable history, but the fun is seeing the twists and turns, and ways we’ve kind of maneuvered it to be a little different.”
One possibly unexpected change to look for? Wolpert discussed how Ted Kennedy’s life might have been affected, had the space race gone a little differently: “The Chappaquiddick Event with Ted Kennedy happened the week before Apollo 11 landed; and so, if the Russians had beaten us, our positing is that Ted Kennedy wouldn’t—he would have canceled the Chappaquiddick party and gone back to Washington…[The Event] never happened in our history, so Ted Kennedy would’ve been a viable political candidate in our world. And it’s those little things that totally reshape, as you go along in time, the American landscape.”
Navidi gave a broader view: “On a bigger scale, once we beat the Russians, the race was over. Essentially, the Russians didn’t have the financing to keep up with us anymore. In our alt-history, that race continues. So, what you have to think about is, ‘what does that do to the geopolitics to the world of that time, where the front line in the Cold War suddenly becomes the moon?’ So, it means Vietnam is not as important as it was, and other events that you remember from the ‘70s suddenly don’t have as much of a focus because the moon is now truly the focus in the Cold War. I think that, really, is something that carries through with this show in season one.”
And Wolpert brought the concept back to some more specifics: “It was very important to us that we, especially in this first season, connect our characters to real people to make the alternate history more believable. Gene Kranz, that everybody knows, is a character in our show. Deke Slayton. The crew of Apollo 11 are all characters in our show,” but those famous astronauts are in the background, rather than the focus.
This idea of creating something that was “as grounded and authentic as possible,” as Navidi would later describe FOR ALL MANKIND’s world, also carried over to the series’ space exploration element. From Moore: “It’s a very detail-oriented show in a lot of ways. Constructing an alternate history and really trying to make that plausible and believable, thinking through all the various repercussions of changing certain events, takes a lot of time and energy in the writers’ room, a lot of research…Then, there’s the physical production that is recreating an era—multiple eras, really—with spacecraft and real-life things…and we’re trying to make them really true, so that takes a huge amount of work. And then, shooting it—shooting people in spacesuits on soundstages—making them look like they’re really on the moon is not an easy process to get it right; to really make it look believable to the audience is very time consuming. It’s tedious; it’s physically difficult for the actors. So, it’s a hard production in a lot of ways. But it’s a really fun one. I think everyone on the show has really had a good attitude, and we’ve really enjoyed it…There’s a special quality, I think, to what we’re doing.”
Davis continued the discussion of how working with realistic spacesuits and attempting to make space exploration authentic were both uniquely difficult: “Some of the actors get a little bit uncomfortable in there. It’s hot. We don’t have some of the same breathing apparatuses they do in the real-life spacesuits…Recreating how you walk on the moon is difficult because I think we’ve all seen APOLLO 13; we’ve all seen these movies, and you expect a certain thing, and it’s hard to replicate that.”
Despite any challenges, though, what you will see on FOR ALL MANKIND will feel more like fact than fiction; and this is, in no small part, due to the amount of research and hard work put in by all involved. A flight director from the Apollo era gave a seminar. The team also brought in tech consultants from NASA, who taught the actors how to properly read modules. The flight manuals, readouts, and 1969 Mission Control set are all authentic.
Wrenn Schmidt recalled one of her reaction to seeing the Mission Control set for the first time: “The hairs on the back of my neck stood up because it felt like walking into the room.” She didn’t feel like she had to pretend anymore because of the “huge gift” of getting such a true-to-life set, courtesy of production designer Dan Bishop (MAD MEN).
FOR ALL MANKIND will stream on AppleTV+ beginning on November 1 and has already been picked up for a second season.
