In Apple TV’s ‘Star City,’ Russians beat us to the moon

Early in Apple TV’s Star City, an error forces a Soviet cosmonaut’s reentry pod to land in Siberia. Stepping out of the capsule, our heroine is briefly menaced by a bear. Has the Marxist-Leninist state arranged for the creature’s appearance, subduing an erratic “worker” by means of its symbolic beast? Unlikely. Yet it says something about the new drama’s Cold War premise that we briefly consider the possibility.

Star City is a spinoff of For All Mankind, the streaming service’s five-season take on an alternate-history space race. As that series opened, Americans watched in dismay as the Russians beat us to the moon, adorning the lunar surface with the hammer and sickle. Star City tells the same story from the Soviet perspective, a choice that takes us back to the heady days of 1969. Leonid Brezhnev is in power, the bipolar world grinds on, and the New Soviet man has just made an impressive stride.

The show is impeccably acted and cast. Alice Englert plays Anastasia Belikova, the first woman on the moon and the recipient of the aforementioned “grizzly” treatment. Her husband, Sasha Polivanov (Solly McLeod), is a hotshot pilot whose own space ventures have not been without their flaws. Among Sasha’s earthly peccadillos is an affair with Tanya Mironova (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), wife of a fellow cosmonaut and a onetime target of American spies. Completing this menage is Tanya’s husband, Valya Mironov (Adam Nagaitis), a veteran space man who, in the new series’s first episode, accompanies Anastasia to the moon.

Showrunners Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert’s first job is to keep these characters straight for viewers, and they do so admirably. At times as domestic as a Tolstoy novel, Star City leaves the stratosphere only after grounding its heroes in household concerns. Chief among these for Anastasia and Sasha is the navigation of a union that has been arranged by the state. “You cannot be the exemplar of Soviet womanhood as a single woman,” a commissar tells the bride-to-be. For Tanya and Valya, the problems of married life are at once more ordinary and harder to solve. Valya is working too much, leaving Tanya without the attention she craves. And who, during a rare visit to Moscow, is the woman with whom Valya nervously locks eyes across a bar?

Rhys Ifans in ‘Star City.’ (Courtesy of Apple TV+)

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Star City’s other narrative engines are the perils of space travel and the injustices of life behind the Iron Curtain. Each boosts the production in its own particular way. Like other space-flight dramas, Apple’s latest must transcend the necessary technicalities embedded in its dialogue to help audiences along. “Depressurize the hab” means little to the untutored viewer. The show’s music and sound editing, both unobtrusively excellent, do much to teach us the stakes of any given moment. So does the performance of House of the Dragon’s Rhys Ifans as Sergei Korolev, the Soviet program’s kindly, driven chief designer. Yet Nedivi and Wolpert’s ultimate fallback is their understanding that TV exists to be seen. One shot of a cosmonaut blown from an airlock is worth a thousand pages of mechanical exposition.

The same is true of the inclusion of certain telling details, one or two of which will do to establish an entire Soviet world. Under constant surveillance because of her husband’s job, Tanya procures a samizdat record (the Guess Who’s “Undun”) camouflaged as X-ray film, but the bootleg begins to degrade after a single spin. And Anastasia’s return from the moon sees her introduced to a lookalike who will literally replace her if she misbehaves. Standing in for the apparatus behind these indignities is Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin), a KGB officer so drearily competent that one expects to catch her memorizing the latest five-year plan. More interesting by far is the older woman’s uncertain protege, Irina Morozova. Played by a brilliant Agnes O’Casey, Irina brings to mind the Stasi protagonist of the East Berlin-set feature film The Lives of Others (2006). For both characters, a job as a state eavesdropper produces compelling moral qualms.

Although the new show is easily good enough to stand on its own, for those who know and love For All Mankind, Easter eggs await. Because the original series has progressed as far as the 2010s, audiences already know Irina’s fate as a hapless apparatchik and Siberian deportee. Fan-favorite Sergei Nikulov, For All Mankind’s beloved defector extraordinaire, appears here as an eager young member of Soviet ground control. The familiarity of some audiences with these characters’ futures in no way detracts from Star City’s narrative power. In some ways, it heightens it. To adapt Dr. Johnson, when a man knows a TV character is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

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Were I to lodge one complaint about the series, it would be that the actors sound distractingly wrong, despite their quality. In The Americans, FX’s Cold War masterpiece, Russian characters were played by Russians speaking their own (subtitled) language. For All Mankind’s Soviets are Russian actors using Russian-accented English. Star City, meanwhile, casts Brits as Russians and lets them speak as if they have just crawled out of a Yorkshire mine. That we occasionally see Cyrillic script onscreen only adds to our disorientation. Where on Earth is this “Russia” supposed to be?

I suppose Nedivi and Wolpert thought viewers would eventually get used to the aural confusion. I never quite did. “Oi, comrade! That berk just nicked my Das Kapital!” Innit?

Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.