For All Mankind Season 4: Original Cast Member Not Returning as Series Regular

Season 3 ended with a dramatic shake up and an eight-year time jump.

By Cameron Bonomolo

For All Mankind is taking another giant leap. Jodi Balfour, an original cast member since the alternate reality series premiered in 2019, will not return as a series regular for season 4. TVLine reports Balfour will continue to appear in some capacity as Ellen Wilson (née Waverly), the first female president of the United States. Balfour joined the Apple TV+ series in the season one episode "Nixon's Women," with Waverly becoming one of the first female US astronauts as part of NASA's Women Astronauts Program, and later the 41st President.

The space drama explores what would have happened if the global space race had never ended, presenting an aspirational world where NASA astronauts, engineers and their families find themselves in the center of extraordinary events seen through the prism of an alternate history timeline: a world in which the USSR beats the US to the moon. In the 1990s-set season 3, it's a race to launch missions to Mars.

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In the penultimate "Coming Home" episode of season 3, President Wilson announced to the American public that she's gay as her administration launched an executive order to allow gay men and women to openly serve in the military. She was last seen reuniting with ex-girlfriend Pam Horton (Meghan Leathers) as the season finale leaped another eight years forward in time to 2003.

"I'll be around, yeah. I'll be around. Probably not in as much of a capacity as previous seasons, but it's really important to me and to the writers that Ellen's a part of the world, and we know that she also means a lot to the audience," Balfour told Screen Rant in an August 2022 interview. "I really wish I had any information [laughs]. I don't, but I'm not disappearing."

However, Season 4 will also be without — spoilers — Karen Baldwin (Shantel VanSanten) and Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger), among the dozens of victims of the domestic terrorist attack on the Johnson Space Centerin the "Stranger in a Strange Land" season 3 finale.

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Joel Kinnaman, Krys Marshall, Edi Gathegi, Cynthy Wu, Casey W. Johnson, Coral Peña, and Wrenn Schmidt reprise their roles in For All Mankind season 4. Also on board for the new season are new series regular Daniel Stern (Shrill), playing NASA administrator Eli Hobson, Svetlana Efremova (The Americans) as high-ranking Soviet official Irina Morozova, and Tyner Rushing (The Terminal List) and Toby Kebbell (Servant) as Mars colony workers.

Sony Pictures Television and Apple TV have not yet revealed a release date for season 4.

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