What is Star City about? The Apple TV thriller Variety called "flawless", explained

Apple put out a For All Mankind spin-off on the same night the parent show finished its fifth season, which is either confidence or arithmetic. Variety's review headline used the word flawless — not a word that outlet spends freely.

Star City is an eight-episode alternate-history spy thriller set inside the Soviet space programme, beginning with the Moon landing that kicked off For All Mankind in 1969. It premiered on Apple TV on 29 May 2026 with two episodes, ran weekly, and finished with "The Wolves" on 10 July 2026.

Where and when it's set

The title is literal. Star City is the real-world home of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside Moscow, where Soviet cosmonauts lived and trained. The series opens on Alexei Leonov planting the flag on the Moon — the same event that opens For All Mankind — and then stays on the ground, in mission control, in the surveillance rooms, and in the cosmonauts' flats.

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Created by Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert and Ronald D. Moore, it was shot entirely in Vilnius, Lithuania, from February to August 2025. Episodes run 55 to 65 minutes.

Apple's own synopsis calls it a "propulsive, paranoid thriller". The marketing line was blunter: it's more dangerous on the ground than it is in space.

The man with no name

Rhys Ifans plays the Chief Designer, credited by title rather than name for most of the season. He is Sergei Korolev, the engineer behind Sputnik and the R-7 rocket, whose identity the Soviet state classified while he was alive.

This matters more than a casting note. The real Korolev died on 14 January 1966 during surgery. His survival is the point of divergence for the entire franchise — the reason the USSR reached the Moon first and the reason For All Mankind's timeline exists at all. Endre Hules played him in the parent show.

Who else matters

• Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin) — head of KGB surveillance at Star City, known as the Night Witch, and the actual power in the programme.
• Irina Morozova (Agnes O'Casey) — a young recruit to the surveillance department, and the same woman who runs Roscosmos decades later in For All Mankind, where Svetlana Efremova plays her.
• Anastasia (Alice Englert) and Sasha (Solly McLeod) — cosmonauts in an arranged marriage that the state finds useful.
• Valya Mironov (Adam Nagaitis) — a cosmonaut the Chief Designer trusts, with a wife, Tanya (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), whose dissident history is on file.
• Chada Lakshmi (Priya Kansara) — an Indian engineer recruited for her expertise and watched accordingly.

Early on, cosmonaut Yana Akhmatova (Niamh Algar) is accused of spying for the Americans. The accusation is false. It is also easier to act on than to withdraw.

"We do not arrest the innocent," Raskova explains.

Do you need to watch For All Mankind first?

No. Reviewers were unusually consistent on this — it works as a standalone, and several suggested it's a better entry point than committing to five seasons of the parent show. Knowing Irina's future adds a layer; not knowing it costs you nothing.

The reviews, and whether it's coming back

Variety put it on its best-shows-of-the-year-so-far list. Critics praised the cast while noting that the deliberately grey, dim photography occasionally tips into illegible. As of September 2026, Apple has not announced a second season, which is normal for a service that often takes months to decide. For All Mankind itself has been renewed for a sixth and final season, due in 2027.

Earlier we wrote: Slow Horses is about to drop its sixth season in five years, and season 7 is already penned in for 2027