For All Mankind: Season 2 Videos

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For All Mankind: Season 2 First Look

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For All Mankind: Season 2 Trailer

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News & Interviews for For All Mankind: Season 2

Audience Reviews for For All Mankind: Season 2

• Apr 24, 2022

  Show keeps it coming! Continuing on from the first season blending in history with great acting and catching developments.
  Timothy H
• Apr 11, 2022

  Painfully Clumsy WARNING: Detailed Spoilers Ahead There is a school of thought that says that the purpose of art is to elicit an emotional response in the public: not necessarily to make people feel good but rather to make people feel something. When judging whether art is successful, strong negative emotions can be just as valid as positive ones. However, strong negative emotions clash with success when 1) the artist did not intend to create such strong negative emotions; and 2) the artist is dependent on the public enjoying their work in order to make a living. Some shows are so bad they are good, others like Sharknado are intentionally bad and hope the audience finds humor in their shame. Sadly, For All Mankind generates powerful negative emotions without intending to do so. As a child of the 60's I watched the moon landings as they were happening. I grew up on Star Trek and the excitement of space exploration. I enjoy many SciFi shows with strong female leads such as The Walking Dead, Agents of SHIELD, Killjoys, Star Trek and I have few adult inhibitions as my PornHub profile will attest to. I was primed to like this show. On the surface it seemed to check all the boxes as a show I could watch voraciously: space, alternate history, drama, big special effects budget. I had read other reviews that talked about the show's issues but I was willing to dismiss many of them as being written by misogynistic troglodytes based on sweeping generalizations and the language that they used and because I thought I could just gloss over the show's rough patches because every show has flaws and I really, really wanted to like this one. I watched every episode in their entirety hoping that I could ignore these flaws or that there would be something that made the effort worthwhile. Unfortunately, it's worse, far, far worse than I imagined and the reward never really materialized. As a result, I'm including detailed spoilers in this review because I want to be clear about why I find this show unwatchable and to warn off anyone who, like my former self, thinks that these flaws can be ignored or that they are even fixable. For All Mankind is principally a story about the people involved in an alternate history space race. It's about people, not things or events. It gets its drama more from the interpersonal relationships between the characters than it does from the special effects. It tells the characters' stories through different interconnected storylines so there isn't any one main character. Normally, focusing on the people is a good thing and having lots of characters for the audience to invest in also a good thing. However, one story line is so unbelievably bad that it actually wrecks the entire second season even to the point of robbing all the other story lines of their impact. I'm talking about the "Karen" story line. Many shows depict characters doing horrible things and then following a satisfying redemption arc. Sometimes adding shock value increases drama. When the characters in Game of Thrones kill children or engage in incest, the audience is shocked and a little titillated because those characters live in a violent world; they have no basis for understanding that incest is bad and their actions can be explained in the context of the world they live in. However, Karen has no such (a)moral excuses when she has a sexual affair with her dead son's best friend that she's known since he was an infant. In case someone is tempted to watch just for the sex: don't bother. It's not at all graphic but it is incredibly disturbing not for what is shown on screen but for how it is set up, how drawn out it is, how Karen behaves afterwards and how the writers and the show's directors seem to be completely oblivious about just how despicable they have made her. Unfortunately, it is the nature of the affair and the utterly tone-deaf writing behind it, that metastasize what might have been some brief spicy drama into something that completely consumes the show like a cancer. Karen doesn't just gain some agency and have an affair as the writers seem to want us to believe. If she had been even a little selective in choosing her paramour (that handsome millionaire that bought her bar was an option) the affair would have been much less painful to watch. Instead, she literally spreads her legs for a song! And to a boy that she knew since he was in diapers! That's how absolutely little value she placed on her marriage to a husband who gave up space for her and loved her so much that he couldn't even have revenge sex after she betrayed him and selfishly revealed the affair to him. Afterwards we're supposed to believe that she feels bad about it but everything she does to Ed suggests that she has no regrets or doesn't care. She literally describes the affair to Ed as a "choice" as if it is no more consequential than deciding which shoes to wear and fully expects him to forgive her for it. She never admits regret for the affair even to her daughter who is worried that the family is falling apart. She apparently never considered the effect it would have on her daughter who is friends with the boy she was jumping into bed with. She imposes a hug on Ed at his friend's funeral which he's visibly uncomfortable receiving. And she selfishly drives off with her and Ed's daughter in the season finale leaving him alone and isolated, either unaware or not caring just how hurtful her precious "choices" are. Its this last act of cruelty that convinces me that the series is utterly doomed because it clearly shows that the real-life writers, like the fictional Karen, are oblivious to what they have done. By focusing on the cheap thrill of some "forbidden love" and by trying to elevate the cheater to the status of sympathetic hero without going though any kind of redemption arc, the writers end up betraying their own audience who came to watch this show for the "what if the space race never ended" and instead got "what if Jerry Springer ran NASA." What makes this even worse is that it's not fixable. The writers were clearly unaware of the revulsion that many in the audience would feel toward Karen's behavior and lack of consequences. Apparently, they thought that staring at some clouds while smoking a cigarette is enough to convey contrition. Or perhaps they thought that we would be happy that she's finally taking charge of her life even if it means using her new found agency to callously destroy the people who love her. The set up for season three clearly indicates that her daughter and her lover are going to be central characters so they can't sweep this under the rug and pretend that it didn't happen. There's no logical way for this to move forward, because there is no plausible set of actions that would cause either Ed or the audience to forgive her. Even if the Karen and Ed characters are both completely written out of season three (thanks to a 15 year jump in time at the finale), whenever the children are on screen, the audience will remember just how little respect Karen had for her family and her marriage as well as how little respect the writers have for the audience that just might empathize with Ed over the cheater. Sacking the writers and replacing them with a less juvenile group for season three won't help even if they weren't already in production. I'm sure that even the writers of The Walking Dead who are experts at redemption arcs and writing for strong female leads would struggle with the salted earth of a story that these writers have left behind. Yes, I'm aware that Nichole Beattie wrote 5 episodes of TWD but, apparently, that experience wasn't enough. So, I'm not coming back for season three. The thought of cancelling my Apple TV subscription over this has actually crossed my mind. If, after reading this, you chose to watch this show… well you were warned.
  Shaun M
• Mar 14, 2022

  One of the most insulting shows ever made by some of the most vile writers on the planet. They probably wear really small hates to make their brains seem larger than they really are. They want to rewrite history in the minds of the masses and cast all straight white males as depressing villain's and all degenerates, african americans and immigrants as unsung heroes of the utmost virtue! it's garbage.
  William H
• Jan 30, 2022

  A mash-up of general hospital, Star Trek, and young and restless with overtones of Dallas. Bad science and questionable docu- history. Just entertaining.
  K C R
• Jan 20, 2022

  Fantastic show – an amazing season two
  M l
• Jan 19, 2022

  Became a soap in the second season. Some seem to feel a good soap but its not what wanted from this show.
  m g
• Jan 13, 2022

  Incredibly well written drama that faithfully portrays a world where the space race didn't sputter out after man first set foot on the moon. The writers clearly consulted with a great deal of aerospace history experts because there were many small nods to some of the projects that never made it off the drawing board in real life, being brought to fruition. The show does a great job at giving all of the main characters a great amount of depth and avoids the one-dimensionally good heroes fighting the evil one-dimensional commies.
  

  Robert H
• Jan 10, 2022

  This show really surprised me with how good it was. If not for one completely baffling choice they made (you'll know if you watch it) in Episode 8, this would have been 5 stars for me, easily. Great cast, and great production values.
  Daniel C
• Dec 31, 2021

  Not much happening in space its like its always the same plot in this series, something goes wrong , gets redondent and boring , if you expecting a war USA vs Russians in space well 1 episode is that out of the 10.
  eric l
• Dec 18, 2021

  This show portraits an alternate timeline where everyone involved with the American space program is an alcoholic. There is booze and tobacco in literally 90% of scenes, even in SPACE! Laughable. It also has enough of the infamous 2020's toxic inclusivity to fuel a rocket to Mars. (i.e. let's just throw some people of color and LGBT in there, so no one could point out how stupid our show is without risking sounding racist/homophobic) The show follows the personal dramas of the most flawed people to ever reach space since Armageddon, and yet they still manage to be boring and forgettable. This badly run space circus tries to teach us how you can save the world by ignoring safety procedures, common sense, and of course, making sure to kill the blue-eyed magazine cover power couple - for good measure. I can't fathom how a group of people with an even somewhat functioning brain gave this badly written, badly directed, badly acted, miserable attempt at sci-fi a 100% rating. This feels more like an attempt by a 17 year old who watched a "how to make a TV show in 10 simple steps" story on TikTok.
  John B

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