Hacker Cinema
For All Mankind
2019 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Matt Wolpert, Ronald D. Moore, Ben Nedivi
DramaScience FictionFantasyWar
Explore an aspirational world where NASA and the space program remained a priority and a focal point of our hopes and dreams as told through the lives of NASA astronauts, engineers, and their families.
43 positive5 negative8 mixed27 neutralfrom 83 commenters
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92 comments on Hacker News
I would be happy to pay to buy or rent a single show or movie. The problem is that a lot of that content is only available with a monthly subscription. Screw that, those monthly bills eat you alive. I hear that the For All Mankind series is pretty good but there's no way I'm signing up for Apple TV just to watch that. So I'll skip it and watch something else.
Funny to consider how many Apples are showcased on Apple TV shows. I think the most ridiculous one was "For All Mankind" where civilization was so advanced it featured colonies on the Moon and Mars... yet used current Apple phones and devices. How unimaginative.
> versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with
I disagree with this take quite a bit. Yes, software could be better, but Apple TV+ has given dozens of shows the budget and freedom to produce some truly generation-defining art. Ted Lasso, Severance, and For All Mankind are huge stand-outs in their scope, depth, and ambition. For instance, the latter is produced by Sony, yet you see nearly zero product placement, which has been a hallmark of the studio for over a decade now. Putting gobs of money into storytelling yields purer, and therefore more compelling, narratives that will hold up well over time and represent the best of what we are capable of. At the same time, Apple TV+ as a subscription service is also a very convenient way for Apple to weather any ups and downs in the physical product categories.
I’ve seen most of those. Slow horses is phenomenal no notes. for all mankind would be as well if not for the low grade melodrama of the middle seasons, but all the space stuff is amazing. silo is good fun but like severance we’ve gotten two short seasons in how many years? shrinking started out great but did a speedrun in one season of what normally takes jenji kohan three. Foundation has decent highs especially with the dynasty and invictus in season two, but the lows are loooww. And of course severance might even be a masterpiece.
But my point wasn’t that they don’t make good television because they do, it’s that their shows aren’t talked about nearly as much in the mainstream because people don’t have Apple tv. I think Ted lasso and to a lesser degree severance are really their only major popular hits. Most people I talk to haven’t seen slow horses. If it were on Netflix it would be the opposite.
For All Mankind aired an episode today that movingly commemorated the fictional lead character Ed Baldwin's Apollo 10-like in-universe mission on the same day that the real world Artemis II mission which also strongly resembles Apollo 10 landed safely. A strange and moving coincidence.
When apple puts an advert for an apple show in front of for all mankind, that's an advert.
Maybe I put up with it and it just adds to my subconscious seething, or maybe I get the episode elsewhere because if I watch on jellyfin I don't have the advert. Of course that then harms the show as my viewing isn't counted, but they've cancelled it anyway so perhaps it doesn't really matter.
If it isn't an advert, then at very least there's a button to disable it.
Also on the TV/movie front science fiction is doing quite well right now.
Apple TV seems to have made producing good scifi series one of their main selling points. Lots of famous scifi series are getting TV adaptations and apple TV is producing wholly new scifi series as well.
Foundation, Murderbot, Silo, For All Mankind (and the upcoming Star City), Severence, Dark Matter, Monarch, Pluribus, and Neuromancer to name some of the current and upcoming series.
And of course if my theory is right I suspect the upcoming Firefly announcement will be that Apple TV is picking them up for a continuation as well.
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But also scifi has a lot of other avenues for exploring their ideas now (such as via interactive media/video games). I'd argue some of the best scifi works of the current generation come from interactive media/video games rather than television or movie. Ex: Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle 1&2, Nier, VA-11 Hall-A, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Deus Ex, etc.
Like frankly television and movie are massively expensive and books are way harder to sell now than they ever were (as discoverability and reach are poor) but video games as a more visual medium are easier to sell but at the same time the entry point for making them is an order of magnitude lower than TV or movies. So it's not terribly surprising to see scifi flourish with games where other mediums have found themselves in a slump.
Good sci-fi has always been few and far between. I love sci-fi, but I also dislike a lot of it because a lot of it's not well written from a prose craft or character depth point of view. When it is, it's probably my favorite genre.
I feel like we're lucky to get one outstanding sci-fi book or series per decade.
I'll rattle off some notable books and films/TV (or in some cases both) from the last 20 years. Some of these overlap with other genres like horror, lit-fic, etc., but I consider them all sci-fi to some degree. Some are well known and some are obscure.
The Expanse, Europa Report, Moon, Primer, The Arrival, Never Let Me Go, For All Mankind (the unofficial Expanse prequel), Sleep Dealer (indie film that stuck with me), The Color Out of Space (2019 film of Lovecraft's story), Banshee Chapter, The Peripheral, Blindsight, Annihilation, I'm sure I could keep going...
This is precisely what happens in the Apple TV series “For All Mankind” an I think it’s a pretty realistic take on how future lunar and Martian settlements would work (either everyone cooperates or everyone is cooked)
For literature: House of Suns if you feel like strapping in for a wild ride that nevertheless doesn't do unspeakable things to the laws of physics and logic. Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse if you're looking for a more "relatable" setting. Children of Time if you want an alien experience.
I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed to be good TV shows, but I haven't seen them yet.
Vision Pro's only problem is the price. At $1k I think we would see a lot more adoption. I say this as a former skeptic and who gets VR sickness from other AR/VR devices, and hates the idea of strapping a device to my face and being isolated from my surroundings.
I got an AVP for work (long story), and was blown away. No VR sickness. I can work from anywhere with my laptop while enjoying a massive, wrap-around high resolution (virtual) display. I can relive vacation photos in full 3D. I can watch For All Mankind projected on a drive-in movie theatre screen in a lunar crater, while laying in my bed.
I think I'd have to go back to the original iPhone to think of a product that is so innovative and visionary that you just KNOW from first use that it will completely transform the way we interact with computers.
But at $3,500? Nobody can afford that, and only a small subset of the 1% would even consider buying one.
That's the conceit for the tv show For All Mankind - what if the space race didn't end? But I don't buy it, IMO the space race ended for material reasons rather than political. Space is just too hard and there is not much of value "out there". But regardless, it's a futile excuse, markets and politics should be part of any serious prognostication.
When I click "subscribe" on my TV it gives me three options, all with adverts
Maybe I could subscribe and take a risk that I could then buy something again, but it tells me they don't want people paying money, they want people watching adverts.
As such the rare amazon exclusives (mainly clarkson's farm) I will get elsewhere.
Compared to say Paramount, which I once again subscribed to through apple-tv a couple of months ago. I watch new Star Trek and South Park episodes, then unsubscribe, suits me fine, far cheaper than how I used to watch Star Trek in the 1990s.
Likewise I'll subscribe to Apple when for all mankind and morning show come back.
If they want me permamently subscribed, they should go back to making 26 episodes a year.
Like many others have pointed out, Apple is obsessed with avoiding antitrust scrutiny. A fun (edit: incorrect) example: they are fine owning the device you use to connect to their own streaming service to watch their own produced TV shows, but appear to strictly avoid showing their products in those shows.
EDIT: I stand corrected! Multiple "Apple Original Series" contain Apple products, such as in Ted Lasso and (I think implied) in For All Mankind, as people pointed out below. Shows what I know about TV.
I wonder why some Apple Original Series have Apple products, and some don't. I would love to see if there's any correlation between the number of shows which feature a specific product and that product's market share in the show's region or demographic.
I think my point didn't quite come across... Comedy got way more serious and certainly made that (necessary) leap after a big dive in quality during the 00s (thanks Chuck Lorre!). Writers of other genres learned from the successful HBO and AMC productions that TV shows are more than just a fixed universe with a static cast and a dynamic part, and that each episode could be more than one short story told in this staged universe - that is the main part in the leap that makes old shows feel old now.
Thanks for the recommendations, didn't know about The Rehearsal, Shogun, and Reservation Dogs (you wrote "Resevoir Dogs"?). Our tastes may wary, but I think For All Mankind fell back to some 90s formula after season 2.
Pretty much anything on Apple TV is super high quality and worth watching, IMO. Since this is HN, For All Mankind is worth checking out.
Cynical me suspects that the large corporations who get to decide which TV show or feature films get to be made are opposed to depicting workers organising and acting on behalf of their collective interest. This seems to be particularly true in America more so than Europe, e.g, Brassed Off, a British film from the mid-nineties realistically displays working class culture associated with labour unions at a time when the unions were struggling against the closure of the coal pits. Interestingly, according to its Wikipedia article¹, “In the United States, the film was promoted simply as a romantic comedy involving McGregor and Fitzgerald's characters.”
On the other hand, Season 4 of For All Mankind depicted a strike of private sector workers in such an unrealistic, ham-fisted way that it couldn’t be taken seriously – much like many of the other half-assed story-lines that were crammed into the show for Seasons 3 and 4.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassed_Off
Optimistic scifi properties:
* The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (+ sequels)
* Monk & Robot by Becky Chambers (+ sequel)
* Most of, but not all of, Star Trek. This is getting infected with cynicism in some places, but still largely optimistic about a utopian future.
* The Martian by Andy Weir
* For All Mankind on Apple TV+
* Arrival movie
That's what I can think of since the 90s. Doubt it's a complete list, but really Becky Chambers is the optimistic voice in the domain, primarily since she focuses her works on interpersonal vs. galactic or societal dynamics.
Alternatively - and now that I'm thinking about it - I think Apple TV might adopt the A/24 model of purchasing individual movies and shows that they like, and marketing it like crazy.
In fact, that does seem to be Apple TV's model already. For example, Ted Lasso, Mythic Quest, Pachinko, Foundation, Silo, Severance, The Studio, and For All Mankind are all produced by entirely different production houses but licensing for them was acquired by Apple.
There is this one movie but it's set on Mars instead (The Martian). And I think the series For all Mankind also had an episode with this kind of plot.
Oh man, you gave me goosebumps just thinking about that episode. That is one of the best episodes [1] of any sci-fi, ever, IMO. That episode changed my entire life perspective.
Looking at the writer's Wiki [2], he was also behind some amazing DS9 episodes like House of Quark and Rules of engagement. Gah, what happened to sci-fi? Turns out he was even the head guy on For All Mankind. Nobel Prize effect, studio pressure, what is it?
[1] - https://ww1.goojara.to/eGJakb
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_D._Moore
I saw this episode of For All Mankind! It didn't seem to end well
Not just spacenazi nightmare, but basically any capitalism makes the whole idea dumb : watch the tv show For All Mankind. They go right into space unions vs nation state space agencies, pretty interesting actually.
But it would be a nightmare for anyone but musk himself, who wants to go be a space slave for no benefits? There could never be freedom or individualistic incentives, its <1% chance to be like Firefly and >99% chance to be The Expanse
My completely unscientific impression is that other services are making the effort to produce high-quality films and series, including Apple TV+ (Slow Horses, Silo, For All Mankind, Foundation, etc.), Max/HBO (Barry, Curb Your Enthusiasm, GoT, The Last of Us, etc.), FX (Shogun, The Bear, The Old Man, Fargo, etc.), and AMC (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Night Manager, etc.). Whatever you think of the quality of shows in those services, they at least show genuine effort to make things that don't suck.
This includes movies, but browsing their "originals" list, so far I (or my wife) have enjoyed (in no particular order):
Slow Horses Lessons in Chemistry Severance Ted Lasso Shrinking Mythic Quest Roar CODA The Problem with John Stewart And we are looking forward to checking out, in no particular order:
Palm Royale For All Mankind Criminal Record Killers of the Flower Moon Foundation Strange Planet The Morning Show Greyhound They're not all knockout hits. Overall we just feel safer trying something new there. If we don't like it, it's usually just because it's not for us, and less because it feels like an algorithmic, soulless cash grab.
I believe Apple has some fantastic shows. Severance, Tehran, Silo, Slow Horses, Liason, Physical, For All Mankind (season 1).
Whatever the reason may be, the article outlines a few possibilities, I do agree there is a ton of great content on Apple TV+ that people are sleeping on. I recently watched "The Morning Show", "For All Mankind", and "Presumed Innocent." All were absolutely incredible shows, and none of my friends had heard of them (people who are usually very up to date with shows) furthering that their marketing is not the best for their tv content. Ted Lasso seems to be the only show of theirs that I've felt like broke through all the noise and is most widely known.
However, I do think they have been marketing their movies a lot better. One the new movies "Wolfs" with Brad Pitt, and George Clooney had billboards all over my city. I know many people that did watch that the first week it came out.
A chance to describe the unexpected visceral gut punch that was the first ten minutes of For All Mankind (tv series). I wouldn't have thought the US being first to the moon was that important to me, but when I saw it the other way...man was I affected.
I would like to add that everyone should check the incredible documentary "For All Mankind" scored by Brian Eno.
Also dramatized/fictionalized in Season 2 of For All Mankind.
Hmm the only thing I really thought was worth watching was for all mankind. And they've kinda painted themselves into a corner (as the show runners said, there's only so much you can do to age the characters)
It was a decent show though. But it wouldn't make me subscribe. That would take a lot more.
Foundation the TV show was so interesting to me that it pushed me to read the book series.
I'm currently up to Foundation and Earth. The show is different, but I like the changes they made for the show, especially to the emperor's lineage. The show would be painfully boring if it was filmed in the style of the books with characters talking about what happened instead of showing.
I personally find the mentalics aspect of the books kind of lame, unscientific, and God like. I hope the show does not lean so heavily into them as it continues like the books have, but seems inevitable as I read through the book series.
Severance and For All Mankind get all the hype but See, Silo, and Invasion have all been great. The only true miss in their sci-fi shows for me has been Constellation. The only more boring sci-fi show I can think of is Beacon 23.
There was an episode about this in For All Mankind though I have no idea how reality based it was. They depicted it more or less like radiation poisoning.
There's a minor storyline in an episode of 'For All Mankind' where a NASA engineer urinates on himself in the flight control center so as to not leave his post while astronaut lives were in danger. Always wondered if it was inspired by an actual incident during the Apollo era.
What I love about Apple TV+ is that the stuff on it feels like it was made for more than just "do we think this will drive some metric." I'm not saying that you'll like any given program on Apple TV+, but when I open up Netflix I'm bombarded by a bunch of low-rent reality stuff, Disney+ seems to be focused on finding new ways of churning out as many iterations of the same franchises as possible, Max (Warner Bros) is canceling their content, Paramount+ is for Star Trek, and Prime Video is all about showing me content that isn't actually included so I can buy Prime channels.
When I open Apple TV+, I get choices like CODA, the story of a child of deaf adults. Whether you like the movie or not, it's something new and different. I get things like For All Mankind which just feels so much better than anything I've ever watched before and meaningfully different from other stuff I've seen.
I love TV and movies. Not everything has to be grand or new. But there's something nice about opening up Apple TV+ and having a bit of a different experience from what a lot of the apps are pushing.
For those who start For All Mankind, stick with it until the end of episode 2. I dropped out after episode 1 a while ago, thinking it was interesting but a little too slow and everyone was just moping around, but when I gave it a shot again by the end of episode 2 I was hooked and have binged all 4 seasons since.
For All Mankind first two season were great, it was competence porn and the alternative timeline was fresh and cool. Season 3 and 4 are just space drama. Good actors are keeping the characters alive and that doesn't help the overall story (which is totally irrelevant since the end of season 2 anyway).
That's my short take, I could be more nuanced but I don't have the time for a blog post :(.
For All Mankind is great, and there's a fan theory that it's a prequel for The Expanse that really almost works after FAM season 4.
I watched a for all mankind episode in it today in the cinema environment and that was really good.
I’ve similarly watched other videos and it’s good at that, the four immersive video examples are cool.
Window nav is meh, the eye tracking isn’t quite good enough. The windows aren’t small enough to be super useful when trying to do real work on the Mac, for productivity work it’s disappointing in this first version.
I can see how with future hardware you could actually wear all the time, leaving windows in certain locations around your house could be useful, especially if some were shared.
The potential is clear, but it’s still an early adopter device. For media (particularly video) consumption it’s great.
I think my prediction from 2021 held up well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27583456
The movie I'd like to see is For All Mankind without the spoken audio recordings from Apollo but with the album that was originally meant to be the soundtrack.
If you want to see this idea explored even more, I highly recommend watching "For All Mankind" on Apple TV+. My description below hopeful does not contain spoilers.
A Fantastic show for tech optimists, imagining a world where Russians were the first to land on the moon. This spurred increased investment by the US, continuing the space race, avoided the cold war, adoption of EVs in the 80s, massive action on climate change, and many other fun things. I wishfully think of "what could have been", and a world that seems attainable.
One of the recurring plot points is Executive action taken by astronauts in space, wars avoided and caused by their decisions, brave rescues and other heroics. In one of the episodes a characters takes such an action.
If you want juicy space gossip there's a great report[1], with lots of complaints from space station residents, from food to schedule to cross-cultural friction.
I always thought it would make a good Friends-meets-For All Mankind TV series.
[1]: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=28451.0;attach=386989;sess=0
Employment most likely.
An ONG terminal will employ more (unionized) people than Renewable repairs, and it's not like Battery companies are rushing there to train employees from scratch for a product who's entire manufacturing chain is largely automated [0]
Unemployed people vote for alternatives, and it's not like the US can shoot a couple protesters or take them to a blacksite for the "greater good"
I'd recommend watching For All Mankind season 3 - it touches on this point.
[0] - https://www.emobility-engineering.com/automated-battery-manufacturing/
Any advice on how to appreciate the Expanse tv show?
I love backstory and worldbuilding sci-fi the Foundation Trilogy, The Man in the High Castle, For All Mankind, The Silo, The Tick, and Battlestar Galactica, but I can't seem to get immersed with The Expanse despite how much I try.
Is it a work that is better appreciated in the literary form instead of on television? Or did Syfy just jumble the first season?
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
That matches my sentiments with the show perfectly. I actually stopped watching after the second season. I'm glad it sounds like I haven't missed much.
You should check out the documentary, if you haven't already seen it. It looks like it might be on HBO and Fubo as well, according to Justwatch: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/for-all-mankind.
I’ve been binge watching For All Mankind, which takes place in an alternate reality where society kept on pushing further into space after landing on moon.
It really makes me think what could have been if we dedicated more investment towards space travel/research.
This is making me more excited for season four of For All Mankind!
Season 2 captured so much of my 1980s kid "this is the space future I was promised". At the time my uncle even worked on projects at Nasa and would describe some of the ideals of the space shuttle program in a way that For All Mankind Season 2 captured that boring reality never quite did, especially after the Challenger disaster.
(Plus, spoilers: Project Orion in that season! Which is one of the things that I can point to where FAM's timeline is maybe worse than ours, as it is fun to bring up every time people suggest they can't watch FAM because it is too "utopian". Project Orion was in part cancelled because of advances in cancer research, especially with respect to radiation. The FAM timeline seems to be spending so much on aerospace at the expense of cancer research among other things, and things like the 80s and 90s fights against tobacco seem almost non-existent in that timeline. People are still smoking nearly as much in that timeline's 80s as they did in the 50s. There are no signs of the near ubiquitous anti-tobacco PSAs of our timeline's 80s and 90s. I don't know how much the writers are intentionally working in such trade-offs, versus just trying to maintain storylines and aesthetics across its decade jumps, but it makes a ton of sense that there would be such trade-offs. Similarly, there are signs that civil rights are still generally worse in that timeline than ours, especially gay rights and feminism.)
I've ultimately become disappointed with For All Mankind. It has its moments of greatness but literally two thirds of is anti-exploratory, anti-science angst bullshit. I guess it's a alot cheaper to film that stuff.
Severance is a fantastic show.
I do also like For All Mankind, although its started to get a bit silly in later seasons. Season 1 is great however.
Right, I meant to suggest there might be some "culture" bleed. Another commenter suggested it had more to do with key Pixar figures leaving for Disney, at which point Disney's own offerings improved and Pixar's suffered.
I'm not very good at articulating "feelings" so bear with me: Early Pixar movies (to me) are timeless, positive, almost fairy-tale like. They're centrist, middle-of-the-road films that don't offend or validate anyone, just faithfully follow the Hero's Journey as they try to resolve some issue in the ideal world where we're all in this together. Toy Story is the best example-- literally every single toy could not be more different, but the entire point of the movie is about all of them finding ways to leverage their differences to advance the journey for all of them, not exploiting their shortcomings to hold everyone else back. Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, all are the same pattern. Pixar's money printer used to be endless asset-swaps of "Diversity: The Movie" (the secret to Sesame Street as well), and it was a beautiful thing before the concept was perverted by the same children who grew up watching these movies.
I don't have kids' show equivalents to name from AppleTV, but I do get the same feeling ("Diversity: The Show") from their regular shows. Ted Lasso is the obvious frontrunner. For All Mankind, Invasion, Foundation (caveat: I was really high when I watched this one). All of these beautifully weave together the themes of diversity and unity into a shared journey.
Sounds like Bezos just finished season 1 of For All Mankind...
Compared to competitors, Apple TV+ currently appear to put much more emphasis on quality over quantity in their original content. I really enjoyed some shows like Severance, For All Mankind, Trying, Acapulco, Foundation. It reminds me of the time when Netflix Originals stood for content to be excited about. What they don't have is a back catalog of licensed films and shows included with the flat rate offering (they all cost an extra fee).
Red Mars could be an epic TV series (or a multi-part film). But probably getting a bit geopolitically dated these days unless it does a For All Mankind cold war retro thing. Also I imagine having half the crew being Russian wouldn't fly in terms of media palatability at the moment, nor would an updated crew with more Chinese members.
I'll give a couple historical and current examples:
Star Trek was always woke, starting with its at the time quite "woke" black communications' officer and many plots with aliens as stand-ins for different races or nations. The initial show got cancelled (as is often the case with even successful sci-fi) but it gave birth to a giant franchise that continued to be at least somewhat "woke" by contemporary standards. Definitely not a flop.
The Apple TV series For All Mankind is going into season 4 and is relatively popular. I found it pretty good. It's full of "woke" stuff but is well written and is based on a really good premise. My favorite fan theory is that it's an unofficial prequel to The Expanse. Not sure I'd call The Expanse "woke" but it's also not not-woke and has a number of background elements like the popularity of polyamory and bisexual characters sure to trigger right-wingers.
Sci-fi in general has always been kind of on the woke side of things.
Films, lots of them. There's many films about civil rights and social justice struggles that are quite good and did not flop: Mississippi Burning, Schindler's List, 12 Years a Slave, Hidden Figures, etc. Disney has recently made a bunch of Pixar films that are pretty woke and didn't exactly flop.
IMHO the woke flops we're all familiar with are just bad writing. Boring plots, uninteresting characters, and shitty writing is gonna be crap regardless of whether it's "woke."
I haven’t (yet) watched Twin Peaks but I’d wholeheartedly concur with that endorsement. For quality / episode ratio, I’d put it up there with the first four seasons of the Wire (10/10).
The first episode of Severance is quite slow with regards to plot but still visually compelling. The cinematography, music and character building stay consistently excellent throughout the series but the drama and tension increasingly ramp up so much that my wife and I were on the edge of our seats for the last few episodes. It was so good that I intend to re-watch Season One before watching Season Two (I’m guessing that there will be follow-up) comes out.
My wife and I both really enjoyed the first two seasons of For All Mankind. She generally dislikes science fiction and anything to do with space but was soon won over by the human element and the great characters. However, we both felt that the quality of the show (particularly the writing) fell hard with the third season.
We both also thought that Shining Girls was an excellent mini-series and have Slow Horses lined up to watch next.
If you haven't seen "For All Mankind" now is the time to watch the first episode.
If there is no way to give money for a service I have no problems with getting it via other means -- when Discovery season 4 came out it wasn't available in the UK, so I downloaded it. A week later after the backlash they put it up for sale, and I spent the £20 or whatever to buy the series.
I have no problems paying for netflix, disney, prime, and now paramount plus. I subscribe to apple TV for for all mankind, then I stop when it's finished.
What I won't do though is pay to watch adverts, that was Cable/Sky TV's market, not interested. Sell me the program and I'll buy it, try to include adverts and I'll get it elsewhere.
In Sweden this has long been portrayed as a foolish, nationalistic enterprise by someone who should have known better, sacrificing lives for no reason. (Combined with a bit of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante)
I wonder if it wouldn't have been (previously) portrayed as primarily courageous in the US, had it all taken place with people from there?
... related, while there is a lot of new excitement about human spaceflight in the US now, almost every single piece of ~current mainstream TV/film drama (with the notable exception The Orville) focusing on space/scifi is dystopic and/or really negatively focusing on the human/family costs of the main characters (example: For All Mankind), to the point where it's getting a bit silly.
I define best as one I’ve been most surprised by with insightful learnings that have helped elsewhere (even if the topic wasn’t initially exciting).
- The Crimson Wing - i don’t suspect you’re into flamingos, I’m not either, by far. Yet this documentary has the most gorgeous cinematography I have every seen in a movie and equally artfully done soundtrack that triggers perfect flow and creative lines of thought/programming any time I listen to it. So watch it not for the content but for the vibe (great if you have kids too).
- The lost pirate kingdom (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt14057360/) Not into pirates either, but this documentary goes into how the democracy of piracy eventually spilled into the US constitution. When the British empire realized they couldn’t pay a navy to dominate the earths oceans, they commissioned mercenaries to do the attacks on Spain for them in exchange for the loot. The mercenaries recruited by giving a equal share to all participants on a ship (equity), which incentivized better than pay as well. They then self organized in cities and eventually migrated to US territory which eventually had its own revolution for independence.
- For All Mankind (not documentary, but alternate history based on more real NASA and JPL situations than any other i’ve seen)
I found these because we watched every documentary about space, nature, and history we could find with the kids so we could “travel” with our minds when we weren’t allowed to do it in person during the pandemic.
Piracy isn't all about price though. It's about convenience too. And it's not actually free. You're not paying the rights holder but pirating these days requires a lot of storage, a VPN perhaps a pay site or Usenet subscription.
But also all the time to set up a media server etc. Connecting it to the TV (and all the tablets and phones) in a way the wife and kids can also grok. They don't want to search for Westworld_S04E01_H264_1080p_BLAHBLA.mkv in a long list. Oops no that's the one with the audio glitch, you need to find the PROPER instead. But why are the voices so quiet compared to the sound effects? Must be a Dolby Atmos downmixing problem. This stuff can really ruin the mood after a long work day.
When you come home you just want to click on the man with the hat and not have to worry about issues. So you'll need time to review the downloads, categorise content or pay for Plex and a beefy server for the transcoding etc. Fix it when it's down. Keep it all updated. It's not very convenient.
Netflix really beat that out with just click & play for a decent price. It was a good deal even being more expensive than piracy because it saved so much hassle. Most people have a life and more money than time to spare now.
But the insane fragmentation is now screwing this up. Soon it may be more convenient for the masses to pirate again. Who wants to juggle 10 different subscriptions and player apps on all their devices, each with their own UI peculiarities? Having to deal with all the ads? But what show is on which service now?? Oh Prime Video has the movie I want to watch but it's only the Spanish dubbed version??? The industry has to do a very bad job to make piracy interesting again but they are well on their way.
I'd pay €50 a month (which is a lot here in Spain) for a service that carries everything. If I watch all of Westworld this week they can send a big chunk of that HBO's way. If I watch for all mankind the next they can pay Apple. This is what Spotify etc do. Why does it have to be so difficult with video :(
I subscribed to appletv again for For All Mankind season 3. Really anoyed by not one, but two, adverts before each episode (one for something else, one for a podcast)
I'll be cancelling after the final episode next week because of these adverts.
There's a great quote by a character in last week's episode of "For all Mankind" that pretty much summarizes my career in a nutshell. No matter my age I plan on living my life by it.
> “These are engineering problems, and we are engineers. Shall we begin?”
It's what I keep thinking about whenever I watch the tv show For All Mankind. It would be so much better if we competed on things that are actually important.
Wasn't Campion's Power of the Dog an Oscar-rated Netflix film? I agree overall however, Apple is competing with the legacy content monsters the right way. Severance was great art, Slow Horses is compelling, Foundation had its issues but also better moments than any Netflix Sci-Fi show I've seen the past few years (Nightflyers, Another Life, etc don't even come close), and For All Mankind is well-written.
Netflix is screwed.
It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you could find it on Netflix, put it in your DVD queue and in a few days receive the DVD in the mail. Their inventory was really good, (with some exceptions) and the service had pretty fast turnaround. Phase 1.
Then broadband started becoming more available, so streaming became a natural extension. Here's where Netflix faced bigger challenges. Initially, IP owners were happy to sell streaming rights for pennies since they didn't have any idea of the real value. Netflix leveraged this to build up an even bigger catalog that wasn't constrained by the number of DVDs in their inventory.
Netflix started to dabble in producing (and buying) content for their streaming. Good stuff like Stranger Things. The Crown. Dark. Babylon Berlin. And IP owners started raising the prices for renewals for movies and series in their catalogs. Netflix decided to cheap out on the quality of their shows. And they started to cut down on their DVD catalog as well.
Now you have all of the IP owners with their own streaming services, so Netflix will find it really hard to stream anything but the crappiest stuff. And they've shown little ability to consistently produce quality series or movies.
Contrast this with ATV+. Apple knew that it had a huge potential customer base, but that licensing IP wasn't going to be sustainable; whatever they streamed had to be exclusive. So they started slow, trying to replace HBO for high quality content. And they had some meh shows like "See." Not bad, but not HBO. Then "The Morning Show," followed by "Ted Lasso." Now they're starting to get some traction. Having an infinite amount of money always helps, but they became pretty good at saying no. "For All Mankind" grabbed a chunk of sci-fi viewers. Greyhound captured the war nerds. Slowly, carefully, they've been building up a pretty solid catalog. Now you have shows like "Servant," "Slow Horses," "The Mosquito Coast," "Foundation."
Cap it off with a series and a movie that have set ATV+ on par with any streaming service: Severance and Coda.
Now ATV+ will never have the catalog that Disney+ has. They might be fine with that. But where does this leave Netflix? Netflix has no serious movies that could compete for an Oscar. They don't seem to have the ability to create must see TV anymore. Perhaps they're too driven by algorithms to give the viewer what Netflix "thinks" they want? I just can't see a path forward for Netflix as other than crappy shows. Even with their foreign content, they face increased price pressure and competition from the other SVODs.
> All the old television networks, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple, and others are pumping out more mediocre
This is a subjective statement. You might even dislike shows on a particular service, but to say all of them are “objectively bad” and you think people watch more of “90s sitcoms” tells me that you probably prefer 90s sitcoms. :)
I’m basically cycling between these providers each month. The Expanse, The Morning Show, Hawkeye, Succession, For All Mankind.
Last year was the most television I’ve watched since I was a kid.
> Musk seems to approach space as a serious thing
Musk sent a car into space as a publicity stunt.
My colleagues liked it, but I found it ... disappointing, that it seemed to signal an end of an era that did see space as a serious thing, like in the film For All Mankind.
>In typical Asimov fashion (he was always accused of being an “incurable explainaholic”), the show relishes in delving into the gritty detail of the countless worlds it explores. From intricate sociologies and histories of different home planets to the attention to specifics on the science of space travel and colonisation, the detail and lore of the universe is endless.
And this is where it also fails. Detailed word-building that sucks you in is missing. It's sacrificed into aesthetically pleasing grand scenes. Trantor architecture, life in the city, and rest of the detail are not working together to create illusion of a living world.
It's very easy to build grandiose and imposing structures in CGI. To make it live, you need to plan all the small details, casual and random interactions. George Lucas is master of this, much cinematic world building than directing.
Other Apple TV series like See and For All Mankind (Ronald D. Moore) are better at this.
Alternate history can be a really powerful way of exploring the way the world works, even if you need to invest some amount of charity in the premise. The best example I can think of would be the TV series "For All Mankind", where the central conceit is really not about how close all of it was to actually happening but about examining the dynamics of American identity in the space race and the Cold War in general.
It's also a risky genre. I can buy the Western Roman Empire not collapsing in the fifth century A.D., but if you extrapolate that to mean that Latin-speaking Napoleon Bonaparte becomes Emperor in 1804 and conquers China it's difficult to take your opinion on historical contingency seriously.
At face value the hypothetical Incan conquest of Spain could really go either way, but there's definitely potential for something fascinating there. I hope this is worth a read.
P.S. It's not exactly the traditional kind of Alternate History, but if you're fascinated by the genre I think the 1632 series by Eric Flint would be right down your alley.
I didn't watch Ted Lasso for a while because I'm not particularly interested in soccer. But a friend highly recommended it to me and now my wife and I have watched the whole season 3 times and can barely wait for the next one to drop.
I've watched Mythic Quest several times too. Love that show a lot. For All Mankind is also great. I've been really happy with my Apple subscription and can't wait to see what else they do.
It's a one hour heavy drama, so it's harder to consume. I watched all of Ted Lasso in two days, I'm still working my way through For All Mankind. Only so many episodes I can watch in a day before I need to decompress.
I really enjoyed "For All Mankind" from Apple. I'm surprised that this tv show is not more popular.
The Expanse handles this stuff much better than other shows, as has been noted many times. As entertaining as it is, For All Mankind gets things very wrong in a lot of cases and falls prey to a lot of the 'space tropes' that plague sci-fi. And I certainly don't expect hard sci-fi realism everywhere, but in something like For All Mankind, which is supposed to exist in an alternate timeline but be firmly planted in the real world, it's jarring. When it's in something like the movie Event Horizon I really don't care about realism.
The TV show "For All Mankind"
Did someone just finish season 2 of For All Mankind?
There’s a character on For All Mankind (the tv show) who sounds like she could be based on her.
I wonder if that character was based on her or if there are others at NASA who came from a similar sort of background.
Their series "For all Mankind" is actually really good. Worth the subscription price on its own.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7772588/
I got it free for a year when I got a new iPhone - took me a while to get into it but started watching "For All Mankind" recently and really enjoying it.
Edit: I've only watched about 5 episodes on Season 1 but one small thing that is pretty neat if it is intentional (and I haven't made a mistake) is the more rapid development of technology in their timeline due to money being spent at NASA rather than keeping the Vietnam War going.
Edit2: For someone in their 50s like me, "For All Mankind" is basically wish fulfilment for the future we had in the past.
Ted Lasso is great. I am a football fan and I was initially attracted to the show for being a comedy about football. After watching it though, I agree that it's a lot less about football and a lot more about humanity. I hope Season 2 comes out soon!
For All Mankind is another great show! A very interesting take on an alternative space race history. Compelling narrative, deep characters, great ambiance. One of the best sci-fi shows of late.
There is a show on Apple TV+ called "For all mankind," (without spoiling) the latest season has a solar flare event, wonder if this is what prompted this article.
Anyways, it's a really great show and recommend anyone watch it if they are interested in the space race to the moon.
For All Mankind is an interesting fictional take on a parallel situation. The series itself is good, but the first fifteen minutes of the first episode are stunning (to me as an American).
For All Mankind is an awesome show, can highly recommend. A very interesting take on how the space race could have gone. Also has some thoughtful insights into how society was in the 60s (well, I suppose that depends on the telling). Starring Joel Kinnaman was also in the 1st season of Altered Carbon (which is what got me to try this series).
Season 2 coming out Friday, looking forward to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series)
I wish I could recommend "For All Mankind", but I can't. And while I feel the first three episodes were strong and well produced, I just really really didn't agree with where it ended up going. I'll still watch the second season because it's scifi on TV and it's a genuinely interesting show, but I can't shake the "late seasons of Battlestar Galactica" feeling the later 2/3rds or the season left me with.
We started watching Episode 1 and I hated it and we turned it off. It turns out that the part that we were watching was the advertisement that was put together by the creator and it's supposed to be terrible. After watching it a bit longer, it hits its stride. It's not as good as "Ted Lasso" or even "For All Mankind", imo, but it's a decent comedy with some very self-aware humor.
On my phone it lets me download Apple TV+ content. The files are shockingly large compared to what Amazon Video downloads are. A 1 hr clip was maybe 800mb in prime, but a few gigabytes from apple. (I don’t have any on my phone atm, but a quick search is telling me episodes of “For all mankind” are ~4GB and an hour long) It looks noticeably better, a massive step up that is completely worth the extra bytes.
On my desktop I always rent stuff through iTunes just cause I can download it in advance, and don’t have to deal with buffering or reduced quality.
See, Truth Be Told, and Amazing Stories seem to be widely panned, and I haven't liked them either though I have yet to finish them. For All Mankind would probably resonate most with the HN community. I liked The Morning Show much more than I expected to, and it was a nuanced depiction of workplace power dynamics along with the behind the scenes of those types of shows. Little America is outstanding, the immigrant stories are authentic and multi-layered without being political. Servant is quite good, it's unsettling throughout and you have to pay close attention. Mythic Quest I found to be funny and entertaining, and people who work in game development say it points to underlying truths. People who I know personally are split on it, maybe if you like the Always Sunny in Philadelphia style then you'll like it more. Episode 5 of Mythic Quest comes out of left field and is in my opinion the single best episode on Apple TV+.
For All Mankind is probably my favorite TV show of the last year or two.
This looks quite a bit more believable than the fake (dubbed) Nixon speeches in "For All Mankind".
Deepfakes could have legitimate applications in film & television production.
> First three episodes for the "For All Mankind" (scifi) are good so are the three episodes for "See". The "The Morning Show" seems to be very good although I'm not in the target audience.
Which is funny because many critics/reviewers have panned all the new shows. I've only watched TMS so far and found it intriguing.
See also:
Apple TV (disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_TV_(disambiguation)
Original programming for Apple TV+ seems to be very good.
First three episodes for the "For All Mankind" (scifi) are good so are the three episodes for "See". The "The Morning Show" seems to be very good although I'm not in the target audience.