The ‘For All Mankind’ Showrunners Think They Know What Silicon Valley Likes

Over five seasons, the fictional human beings in “For All Mankind,” Apple TV’s alt-history space race drama, have accomplished any number of feats: They’ve landed on the moon. And on Mars. They’ve put a woman in the White House—mainstreamed nuclear fusion, too. In another dramatic moment, a group even managed to lasso an asteroid laden with an ultravaluable resource and put it into planetary orbit.

From a corner of Hollywood on real-life planet Earth, showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi think their jobs have been pretty tough, too.

“We knew early on with the show’s concept that the only way to really capture the ideas was to jump in time: that to show the butterfly effect, we’d have to jump decades,” said Nedivi. “But we didn’t really realize what that change in storytelling would do for us.” In other words, it’s been a little trickier than he and Nedivi might’ve imagined to move from reimagining the distant past to picturing an alternative near-present: Season 1 took place in the 1970s. Season 5, which premiered on Friday, is set in the 2010s. And not every jump in time has been greeted positively by critics and fans.

“At first it was about: How do you show the [20th-century] space program changing?” Nedivi said. “And now it’s: How do you show us going to Mars?”