For All Mankind

There [are] moments where For All Mankind lives up to the show it could be. And it could still become that show; even in the moments where I found myself annoyed by the lack of snap and fizz, I was still curious about where it was going. Its small tastes of an alternate timeline are intriguing.

By the end of its first episode, “For All Mankind” feels too weighty to achieve orbit, but if you stick through the first three episodes, the mood and intent of its story arcs begin to cohere.

Domestic drama occupies a lot of screen time and plays out in ways both predictable and unlikely. For all of its polish and cleverness and suspense, “For All Mankind” ultimately puts the soap in space opera.

Moore and company are clearly NASA nerds on a level that surpasses even mine, so it’s not hard to understand why they might want to take a similarly slow-and-steady approach, filling in every key detail along the way that explains how and why their universe is different from our own. But the differences are where For All Mankind is strongest. The sooner the series emphasizes them, the better.

While the series initial struggles with some expository explanations and divergent subplots, it picks up steam once it finds its focus. Especially in the back half of the season, where the characters and their overlapping arcs start to come to life and the series finally veers towards some intriguing (albeit understated) sci-fi leaps to match the socio-political inventions of its alt-history.

You'll find some urgency as episodes wrap, but not a lot. And there's no doubt that the world For All Mankind wants to build is populated with an almost staggering number of people, each getting bits of story, but outside of the women-going-to-space idea, not a lot of it is particularly interesting.

Things do get mildly more interesting when women are invited to join the space program. ... But where “For All of Mankind” loses itself a bit is in how it unpacks its characters; there’s a lot of pulling back, but not a lot of pushing forward. This results in a pace that is simultaneously plodding and sprawling.

The series firmly and ambitiously casts America as second-best, and wonders how that would make us feel. These are the starting moments for the series, co-created by Matt Wolpert, Ben Nedivi and Ronald D. Moore, who toy with time and history in a manner that’s more contemplative than it is wholly entertaining.

Stately and extremely boring.

If you’re intrigued by that premise—and neither exhausted by ‘60s period pieces where brilliant, flawed men brood as brilliant, perfect women endure retro sexism, nor put off by frequent scenes of mission control guys frantically mashing buttons—For All Mankind is going to be your show. If not, there’s little else to see here.