First Impressions: Star City

Thanks to an unavoidable purchase, Apple TV+ has re-entered my life

So I caught up on few shows before my gift subscription expires

I’ll give credit where it’s due, it’s not Netflix. That is to say it doesn’t follow the Netflix Formula of Unending Engagement that has ruined everything from Stranger Things to Avatar. Apple TV is not trying to compete with Discord, Reddit, X, Tik Tok and whatever else is doom scrolling through your life on your smartphone.

Apple TV is, however, HBO. It’s trying to keep you engaged with the quality which is good, except when it starts preaching at you, which is bad. Apple TV also insists on telling you how important and serious it is by its absence of color. It’s unmistakable prestige format TV, or at least this show, Star City follows that “everything is grey” aesthetic. The Soviet milieu actually gives the washed-out palette a justification (that era genuinely looked like that), it’s just that it’s been in so many things lately where it doesn’t belong that irritates more than enhances. That isn’t this show’s fault, it’s every other show’s fault.

Star City is the evil twin of For All Mankind, it follows the same alternate history timeline except from the Soviet perspective, which honestly makes for something that is potentially much better.

The premise is that Sergey Korolev lives long enough to get the N-1 working. This is not as unrealistic as you might think. The N-1’s disastrous IRL track record was in very large part the result of typical Soviet bureaucratic knife fighting after the senior man had died. So the first man on the Moon is Alexi Leonov, and this results in a robustly funded American space program.

This show is so far, better.

It’s not that I’m a Russki-boo, it is’ just that For All Mankind had a LOT of Boomer baggage. It was suffering from what I call the “Notes From Tim” effect that Apple TV is frequently burdened with. Shows that are going along just fine on their own, then suddenly veer into a very Tim Cook friendly direction. In Chief of War this involved keeping the Hawaiian women modestly dressed while Jason Momoa swam around in a G-string. In For All Mankind, it was constantly forcing the show to make history “better.”

The audience starts noticing that certain outcomes occur not because they naturally follow from the premise, but because somebody in 2020-whatever wanted to make a point.

The FAM’s alternate history is basically a Boomer wishlist of events. A Ted Kennedy presidency, Reagan being a single term president who gets all of Carter’s baggage, John Lennon isn’t killed. Events stop feeling like consequences of history and start feeling like consequences of contemporary politics. Von Braun is cast down in the seventies for being NAZI!!!! Women are ramrodded into the Apollo program as astronauts, Gordon Cooper’s wife becomes one. I pulled the plug when a black captain ripped off his ribbon bar and threw it in the face of a corporal on gate guard duty. If this was to set him up as complete asshole as well as a pussy, then mission accomplished but clearly the audience was being instructed to admire him. This is the result of a contemporary writer who has done nothing but write, trying to make a statement. The scene was written by someone who understood what emotion he wanted but didn’t understand how someone from that institution would express it.

As the series went on For All Mankind increasingly became interested in correcting history rather than exploring history. Star City, so far is different.

For instance if the Russians had won the space race, I could see them continuing to pursue lunar colonization no matter the cost. Every landing on the moon would reinforce the message of “Communism works.”

And the lunar colony would have had massive appeal to their national sense of smekalka – it’s one of those words that doesn’t translate cleanly to English, it’s concept that Russians feel is unique to themselves, they take pride in field expedient improvisation that makes due with less. This entire show is a reflection of that national ethos.

That’s the thing about Star City, it seems to have more understanding and respect for the culture it’s trying to portray than For All Mankind does. I could that when I realized the whole cast is white. I expect that to be corrected soon.

The show starts with a woman in Russia having her door pounded on in the middle of night. She opens the door and some KGB officers come in. She surrenders because what else can she do? But then she’s taken to Star City and The Chief Desinger hugs her warmly. So now she’s worried about her husband Alexi Leonov, she wants to know where he is. She is informed he is currently on the Moon. This is the first, she’s even had a hint about this. And it gives you a great feel for the show and its era.

I wish they’d actually concentrated on this for a first episode but instead they went with the first female cosmonaut on the moon. This is canonical to For All Mankind and was definitely a “Notes from Tim” thing so they are stuck with it.

There are two female cosmonauts; one is the Obvious Choice for the Moon landing, strong, assertive, competent the other is her opposite, a mousy sub-competent but a loyal party member - a political appointee Star City is stuck with. But then a chance remark gets the Obvious Choice arrested by the KGB, a confession is beaten out of her and the B-team has to go to the moon.

This creates real stakes and is typical for events that happened during this period.

The writing has more of a right to be confident than FAM does. There is an IRL tradition of cosmonauts pissing on the right rear tire of the launch bus because “Yuri did it” The female cosmonaut is offered a cup of liquid. Without any speech she follows the customs of the cosmonaut tribe and just pisses on the tire. This is the first time they grudgingly respect her. The writing wasn’t pontificating and it allowed the actors to carry the scene.

The lunar mission is based on the Soviet plans of the period. I’ve already spoken about smekalka and this mission exemplified it. The N-1 was as powerful as they could get, it didn’t have the Saturn V’s payload capacity so they had to cut weight everywhere. One cosmonaut instead of two in the lander. A tunnel going from the Soyuz to the lander would be more weight so she had to space walk to the lander. During her space walk the C02 scrubber in her suit failed and the smekalka solution is to punch a hole in the suit, then scramble to the lander.

There were some interesting thematic choices made, we see Leonov’s wife but never Alexi Leonov, who was the prime lunar mission candidate IRL. Korolev is never mentioned by name but it’s obviously him, he is only ever called the Chief Designer which indeed was the only thing he was ever referred to as during his life. It was a matter of state security but there was also a few uncomfortable facets to it as well… He became the Chief Designer while technically remaining a convict. After all he confessed didn’t he? That means he was guilty wasn’t he? And the Soviet Union could not admit to making mistakes. Their irreplaceable man was criminal.

Another example:

There is a young junior KGB officer who conducts her own investigation into the arrest of the Obvious Choice female pilot and finds out it’s all a mistake. She reports her findings and is commended for her diligence. Then the Obvious Choice is shot through the head to cover it all up. The system both rewards and punishes competence. The system is both rational and monstrous. Like any technocracy, the Soviet Union was fundamentally incapable of admitting error because a technocracy’s entire justification for existence is that it doesn’t make mistakes.

Star City isn’t trying to improve history like For All Mankind. Star City isn’t trying to improve the Soviet system. It is trying to understand it.

Star City is not a defense of the Soviet Union. If anything, it may be one of the harshest portrayals of the Soviet system I’ve seen since Chernobyl. The KGB destroys innocent people. The Party values loyalty over competence. The state rewards initiative one moment and punishes it the next. The entire machine is built on the assumption that the machine cannot be wrong.

What makes the show work is that it understands the people trapped inside that machine.

The cosmonauts aren’t modern Californians in Soviet uniforms. The engineers aren’t contemporary writers with slide rules. The KGB isn’t cartoon evil. Everyone behaves as though they genuinely live in this world, and that makes all the difference.

Star City understands something that For All Mankind never did: you don’t need to fix the past to make it interesting. The Soviet space program was already one of the most dramatic human endeavors in history, brilliant people, impossible constraints, a system that could put a woman on the moon and shoot her replacement in the head on the same day, and call both decisions correct. That’s not a setting that needs improvement. It needs a writer willing to look at it straight.

For All Mankind kept flinching. Every time history got uncomfortable it reached for the progressive comfort blanket. Star City doesn’t flinch. The bright young KGB officer who tried to help a wrongly convicted woman who was going to be sent to Siberia, got her killed instead. The Chief Designer runs the most important program in the world while technically remaining a convicted enemy of the state, because the Soviet Union does not make mistakes, and if you’d like to discuss it further there’s a man down the hall with some questions for you.

Two episodes in, this show has earned the grey palette. Everything in it actually was grey.

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