Apple’s Sci-fi Masterpiece Expands Into Full Franchise With First Look at New Spinoff Series

February 26, 2026, 11:50am

Apple TV had a tough hill to climb when it launched its own streaming service, as navigating the crowded space hasn’t been easy for even major players like Disney. One space they have managed to make a name for themselves, however, is in the genre arena, greenlighting major science fiction TV shows and allowing them to find their audience without cancelling them prematurely. It’s proven to work too, as the streamer has continued to find success and just saw its biggest show of all-time premiere with Pluribus. Now, they’re about to make one of their sci-fi tentpoles even bigger with another series.

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For All Mankind has been one of the pillars of Apple TV ever since it premiered, with the alternate-history sci-fi series scratching a major itch for genre fans and giving them something they won’t see on any other streamer. The series is set to premiere its fifth season next month, and now Apple TV has revealed a first look at the first official spinoff of For All Mankind, the Russian-centric Star City. Apple TV has released the first photos from the new show that will officially take one of their biggest show to the next level and make it a complete franchise.

Apple TV’s For All Mankind Becomes a Full Franchise With Star City Spinoff

Created by Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald D. Moore, Star City will expand the scope of the world of For All Mankind, this time detailing the key pivot for the entire series. As fans know, the crux of the entire plot for the series is a what if quesiton: What if the Soviet Union put a man on the moon first, before the United States? This one change to our own history has propelled For All Mankind in major ways, examining how the space race would have differed in the decades that followed that one major distinction.

With Star City, the series will explore that key change to history, but from the perspective of the Soviet Union. According to Apple TV’s press release, the new series will show “the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humankind forward.”

Star City has also confirmed that the first two episodes of the series will premiere on Friday, May 29, arriving on the same day as the Season 5 finale of For All Mankind and further cementing the place of this franchise as one of Apple TV’s biggest hits. New episodes for Star City will premiere once a week after this, with the Season 1 finale premiering on Friday, July 10, on Apple TV.

Star City will also feature an entirely new cast, with familiar faces for anyone that has been an avid TV watched in recent years including Rhys Ifans (House of the Dragon), Anna Maxwell Martin (Motherland), Agnes O’Casey (Black Doves), Alice Englert (Bad Behaviour), Solly McLeod (House of the Dragon), Adam Nagaitis (Chernobyl), Ruby Ashbourne Serkis (I, Jack Wright), Josef Davies (Andor) and Priya Kansara (Bridgerton).

One of the most unique things about Star City that we can see from these first-look photos is how it does not keep the glossy sheen found visually in the flagship series For All Mankind. Instead, Star City has its own unique look, one that harkens to the life behind the Iron Curtain and a classic Soviet style. It remains to be seen how this series will fit alongside For All Mankind as a whole, but being set earlier in the timeline and with a fresh cast of characters seems like the exact right move to keep the franchise alive and maintain Apple TV’s place as a destination for original science fiction.