Apple's New Sci-Fi Series With Near-Perfect RT Score Is a Surprising First (& Begins a New Trend)

The streaming space was a crowded one, even before Disney and Apple decided they would get in on the madness. Both Disney+ and Apple TV+ launched in November of 2019, and in that time have managed to persevere despite major challenges. For Disney+, being the exclusive streaming home of Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, and more is an immediate advantage that something like Apple didn’t have at its disposal; instead, it had to find its own way by delivering a fresh slate of original content (and some licensed titles like Peanuts) to make a name for itself against the likes of Netflix.

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Now, seven years later, it’s clear that Apple’s plan has worked, in part thanks to two strategies: allowing its shows to find an audience rather than cancelling them immediately, and making sure that a lot of its shows live in the science fiction realm. The show that fits into both of these parameters is one of their originals, the alternate history sci-fi show, For All Mankind. Having just wrapped up its fifth season, For All Mankind has officially become Apple TV’s first real franchise, thanks to the just-released spinoff series, Star City. What’s most surprising about the show’s arrival (beyond a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score) is that it’s the first spinoff in Apple TV’s history, and it won’t be the last.

Star City Is Apple TV’s First Spinoff (And Not the Last)

For All Mankind asks a specific question that kicked off the first season back in 2019: What if Russia beat the United States to the Moon? Across its five seasons, the show has reflected on that question with an epic drama that has crossed the cosmos and delivered an alternate history that has optimism at its core and a science-first proclivity for how different the world might actually be. That said, the show has largely been from the POV of the American astronauts, scientists, and soldiers who have been working to win the space race.

Star City flips the idea of For All Mankind on its head, not only returning to the late ’60s within the timeline of the story that the flagship show started in, but flipping its perspective to tell the Soviet Russia side of the story. We know that Russia won the race to the moon, but there are other questions that remain unanswered due to the extreme secrecy behind the Iron Curtain and deep within the Soviet space program (all nestled in the titular “city”).

As a result, Star City arrives as the perfect kind of spinoff to the main show, one that illuminates the world and explores a narrative thread that the original simply cannot. On top of that, it has shifted genres, from a pure sci-fi series to a sci-fi series with the underbelly of a thriller. Furthermore, the show is a hit, with a 96% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and steady viewership that puts it among Apple TV’s top shows.

Seven years into Apple TV’s existence, Star City officially marks the streamer’s first-ever spinoff show, but it won’t be the last. In a fitting move, Apple TV has already confirmed that work has begun on a prequel spinoff to Monarch: Legacy of Monsters; like Star City, the show will be set during the Cold War and fill in the gaps of the MonsterVerse’s narrative during an unexplored time period. Another major Apple hit, the sci-fi thriller Severance, is also poised to expand as well, with EP Ben Stiller confirming last year there are “two specific ideas” for spinoffs.

By comparison, Netflix is quick to spin off their shows and movies the very second that they become remotely popular. After Squid Game‘s first season became their most successful of all time, they not only renewed it for two more, but ordered a reality TV spinoff that actually defied all sense of irony and delivered a real Squid Game. Other flagships from Netflix have gotten the spinoff treatment as well, including Stranger Things (the Tales From ’85 animated series), The Witcher (both the Blood Origin prequel and two animated movies), and Bridgerton (another prequel, focusing on the young Queen Charlotte). All that isn’t even accounting for Netflix’s reality sector, with international variants around the globe for shows like Love Is Blind, Too Hot to Handle, The Circle, and even more.

Suffice to say, the above outlines how different the idea of spinoffs are for the various streaming services, but what’s clear about Apple’s strategy is that they’re taking a good approach. By making sure there’s already an audience for their shows, they choose to expand them to tell new stories that the main show cannot. Rather than chasing success and hoping the brand name alone will get subscribers to tune in, they’re going story first, and it’s paying off.