Creator Ronald D. Moore explained when the show launched in 2019:
I grew up with the Apollo program as a child, which is what sparked my interest in science fiction in general. . . . And when I was growing up and watching the space program in the '70s, I thought it was going to be a success. I thought it would be much bigger than it was then. I dreamed of moon bases and colonization and all kinds of dreams that never came true.
The narrative is filled with one surprising moment after another, many of which were skipped from the headlines. Moon landing, headache-inducing rescue, terrorism, conspiracy theories, US-Soviet brinkmanship, multinational partnerships, cowardly politicians, eccentric rich people, space robbers, North Korean defection, Mars exploration, blackmail. The pop culture style is great, and the indictments of historical figures are often eye-catching (and even illuminating).
Moved by this defiant gesture of goodwill in space, President Reagan flies to Moscow to break the nuclear standoff. A few years later, President Al Gore claimed he had discovered a valuable asteroid (remember when he said he invented the internet?), sparking an international crisis. Wernher von Braun, Deke Slayton, Lee Atwater, Dick Gephardt, Mikhail Gorbachev, and many others dot the narrative in ways big and small. It's really fun if you know history, and if you don't, it's a great opportunity to play 'fact/non-fact'.
The series is full of tragedy, selfishness, cheap politics, and prejudice, but it's all intertwined with flashes of heroism, honor, aspirations, and pure awe. I can't help but reflect that it combines imagination and reflection in a way that I've always found particularly appropriate in inspiring young minds. I think we've lost that balance in recent years. As my colleague Robert Pondiscio noted two years ago in “The Intolerable Gloom of American Schooling,”
[Today] The curriculum and school culture almost seem steeped in the bad and the broken, implying to children that they are fundamentally racist, that the founding documents were lies when they were written, and that they have suffered great misfortune by being born in a country that is democratic. Hanging by a thread. It doesn't matter because we are only a few years away from an irreversible climate catastrophe. . .
Pondiscio also noted:
Some of the best-selling and most widely assigned young adult books of the past 20 years include: 13 reasons, later made into a Netflix series, was criticized for glorifying suicide (the title refers to why a high school girl committed suicide) and features scenes of drug use and sexual abuse. and the hate you give, also a cinematic success centered on the shooting of an unarmed black youth by a police officer. bildungsroman Advantages of being a wallflower Topics include drug use, child molestation, and post-traumatic stress disorder. vigilante This is a story about a gang rape of a high school student.
We've reached a point where stories of self-loathing and oppression can feel like hallmarks of sophistication and authenticity. Anything more measured (or optimistic!) runs the risk of being dismissed as evidence of something not being serious. I regularly hear from college students and K-12 parents that expressing optimistic or patriotic feelings in class can result in ridicule or ridicule, even from teachers. Thoughtful left-wing scholars like Belle Sawhill and Ron Haskins are attacked for popularizing the “sequence of success.” Because militant catastrophists fear that a sense of personal agency could undermine their revolutionary style.
Hell, while our history debate is going on, I already know Valley Forge and federalist papers History and civic education, such as Gettysburg, the passage of the 13th Amendment, Pearl Harbor, and the Berlin Air Raid, are nothing more than a recitation of the victories of presidents and generals. Well, I don’t know what text or curriculum these people are looking at. That may have been a fair criticism in 1984, but I think it's a noteworthy argument in 2024.
for all mankind We celebrate resilience rather than trauma. Maybe it's just me, but I've always found that teenagers have better lives when they see their world as much more than a hopeless hellscape. I fear it gets lost in the agenda-driven historical narratives produced by people like Howard Zinn, Ibram X. Kendi, and “The 1619 Project.” These were taken to absurd lengths, as when the superintendent of a New York charter school network told history teachers to skip stories of black success and instead say, “Every lesson is an opportunity to talk about the legacy of systemic racism.”
for all mankind It grapples at length with issues of gender, race, immigration, and economic inequality, but it does so in a way that is (mostly) more interested in honest contemplation than political grandstanding. This makes sense, given the difficulty of reconciling the far left's insistence that “effort” and “rationality” are racist, or the far right's disdain for science and expertise, with the harsh, practical discipline of space exploration.
You know, a few years ago, vanity fair The reviewer described Season 3's debut as follows: for all mankind It was “competency porn of the highest order,” he noted, noting that the series dared to ask questions. “What if the U.S. government did something like this: . . . that was objectively good?” How about that? Admiration for competence and the ability to imagine the American government as a force for good. Talk about embracing the counterculture! Neither sentiment is very popular right now, at least among social media thugs on the left and right. But still. Nonetheless, they are good, they deserve to be embraced, and especially for young people and those who educate them, they offer something much healthier and more uplifting than the catastrophism popular today.