For All Mankind scores very deserved fourth season renewal
Apple announced the show's extension during its panel at Comic-Con today
Having presumably secured their special effects budget—for dazzling extraterrestrial effects shots and increasingly elaborate old-age makeup for the cast—Apple TV+ announced today at San Diego Comic-Con that it was renewing its sci-fi drama For All Mankind for a fourth season.
The news arrived during the show’s panel at the Con, and on the same day that For All Mankind deploys the finale of its current third season. Series creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi were on hand to deliver the good news, along with cast members Joel Kinnaman, Shantel VanSanten, Jodi Balfour, Sonya Walger, Krys Marshall, Cynthy Wu, Casey Johnson, Coral Peña, Wrenn Schmidt, and Edi Gathegi.
For All Mankind takes place in an alternate version of the last 60 years of history, one in which the Space Race only got more competitive after the Russians beat NASA to the moon. Each season of the show so far has covered one decade of its alt-history; presumably the fourth will bring things into the new millennium, and whoops, we just imagined what 9/11 will be like in the FAM universe, and, yeah, this is going to be a rough one.
In any case: All of this is good news, in so far as For All Mankind remains one of the best dramas on TV—a long-form exploration of a world where science continues to both inspire and divide, and every question of space exploration remains an ultimately very human problem. (Of course, it’s remained mostly snubbed by the Emmys, winning exactly one award for its interactive “Time Capsule” app, but we can keep our fingers crossed for seasons three and four.)
Production on the show’s fourth season is set to begin next month, because the race further and further into the cosmos, and the groundbreaking pushes in old age makeup such striving demands, apparently never sleep.