The First ‘For All Mankind’ Trailer Has Us Hyped for Apple TV+

We’ve know for a few months that Apple is planning to launch its own streaming service, Apple TV+, with a veritable smorgasbord of original content from famous creators and industry giants. Today, Apple dropped the very first official trailer for one of these projects, Ronald D. Moore’s For All Mankind. The science fiction series imagines an alternate universe where the Soviet Union landed on the moon first, setting off an accelerated space race that would wind up changing American culture. The two minute clip might be a small sneak peak at Apple’s upcoming original programming, but it gives us a giant leap in heightened expectations for the service.

Ronald D. Moore is widely considered to be one of the best sci-fi showrunners working out there today. After cutting his teeth on Star Trek series in the ’90s, he rebooted Battlestar Galactica for cable. The series became one of the few major shows to launch the so-called “Golden Age of TV.” By experimenting with narrative structure, leaning on a diverse ensemble, and focusing a space opera on the messy human drama on the proverbial ground, Battlestar Galactica became one of the first “binge-able” shows. Since that show ended, Moore has devoted most of his creative energy to Starz’s hit fantasy romance Outlander. For All Mankind represents his return to a genre he helped innovate.

More than that, the production values in this short trailer are stellar. Moore seems to be folding the meticulous romantic care he’s taken depicting various historic locations in Outlander into his sci-fi aesthetic. And what is that aesthetic? Meaty human drama full of tortured roguish heroes, feisty women warriors, and an ensemble of people working behind-the-scenes to make miracles happen.

It looks as though Altered Carbon and Hanna star Joel Kinnaman is poised to play the “Apollo” of this new series, an astronaut who looks nothing if not frustrated to see the Soviets beat America to the Moon. Elsewhere, it seems that Sarah Jones will play one of many potential female astronauts poised to rise fast thanks to this newfound accelerated space race, and Wrenn Schmidt is either a ground control operator or one of NASA’s legendary human “computers.” In fact, from just this brief clip it looks like Moore is going to play with the vast scientific and political machine that was NASA in its heyday.

If For All Mankind lives up to this first great trailer, that bodes well not only for the show itself, but Apple TV’s potential offerings as a whole.