Star City Shows Soviet Space Race in Gritty New Series
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- Star City is a spin‑off of the alternate‑history series For All Mankind that shifts the narrative to the Soviet side of the space race.
- Anna Maxwell Martin portrays Lyudmilla, a KGB colonel famed for her wartime record and now overseeing surveillance of cosmonauts and engineers.
- Rhys Ifans plays the chief designer who proposes Mars and Venus missions but is blocked by Brezhnev’s focus on lunar competition.
- Niamh Algar’s cosmonaut Yana is deemed to have transgressed, interrogated, and replaced by Alice Englert’s Anastasia Belikova, a less qualified but loyal party member.
- Agnes O’Casey plays Irina, a typist who discovers Yana’s wrongful accusation and impresses Lyudmilla, becoming a potential assistant.
Why it matters: Viewers seeking a darker, politically charged space drama gain a fresh, high‑stakes narrative, while the glossy style of For All Mankind is left behind, potentially shifting audience attention toward more gritty alternate‑history series.
