For All Mankind

Well, I've dipped a toe into Apple's vision of the future of TV by watching the first two episodes of For All Mankind, and I've liked what I've seen so far:

[A...] captivating "what if" take on history from Golden Globe nominee and Emmy Award winner, Ronald D. Moore. Told through the lives of astronauts, engineers and their families, "For All Mankind" imagines a world in which the global space race never ended and the space program remained the cultural centerpiece of America’s hopes and dreams.

The things is, I'm just two episodes in and some of the fun changes to our timeline's history - most obviously the much earlier advent of women in the space programme - are still to come. But so far, the show is giving us a chance to get to know some of our characters and it looks as if we're going to learn about this timeline through how those characters are affected by the various changes, which is definitely the best way to go about this.

The big question is, where does this story end? Do we find ourselves pushing out into space much faster in the last half of the 20th century and beyond because a stronger Soviet presence means that the US can always justify throwing money at NASA and if so where does the story stop? Are we going to move beyond this initial cast of astronauts who were contemporaries of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and if so, when?

Rumour has it that Ronald D Moore and his colleagues have mapped out seven seasons of this show: as with all TV, how much of that we get to see will presumably depend upon the show's success against whatever metrics Apple have decided to apply to it. Seven seasons could take us to the point where our characters have aged to the point where they're heading off to Mars to join the first colonisation effort, or perhaps the last episode will see the grandchildren of our characters inventing the first Cylon or something.