[sbierwagen]

>For All Mankind

I’m halfway through the first season, and it’s got a lot more Ted Lasso-type scenes of people talking about their feelings than I was expecting. Does it refocus more on the actual premise of the show later, or is it like this all the way through?

[entropicdrifter]

It's both a high quality drama about the characters' lives and a detailed, well researched alternate history story with interesting differences in politics and technology as it goes on.

Let's just say it doesn't shy away from torturing its characters, whereas Ted Lasso is a lot more even-handed in that regard, with equal measures of torture and wholesome moments. For All Mankind definitely leans harder towards "outer space makes life difficult and dangerous" in its balance between joy and pain.

[jsnell]

If you're thinking that the original premise was basically an alternative history space program procedural, it'll become less focused on that over time. The space flight parts will become less and less plausible, and the plot will mainly be driven by totally artificial drama and disasters caused by these characters with huge and obvious flaws being given increasing amounts of responsibility.

I think it's still worth watching to a point, but the quality is monotonically decreasing. Once you're annoyed more often than enjoying the show, stop watching. It won't recover. (For me, season 3 was honestly purely a hate-watch of wanting to see just how far down the show would sink.)

[sbierwagen]

Thanks for the heads up. I was pretty checked out by episode 2 (Everyone knew Wernher was a Nazi. Hell, by 1970 they had been rearming Nazis in West Germany to fight the Soviets for 20 years!) but as you say it was only getting worse. I just read through the episode summaries and it doesn't sound like I missed much.

What the hell even happened? It's not like Ronald Moore lacked experience. After Voyager and BSG he should know the formula: the A plot is actual story events and B plot is interpersonal conflict among the cast. You set up conflicts in the B plot to add tension on if they can overcome the challenge in the A plot. What you don't do is spend 40 minutes out of a 60 minute episode on squabbles among the astronaut wives. It's a show about stuff happening in space! Show us things happening in spaceships!

Just another failure to add to the scrap pile of all the "prestige" dramas produced during Peak TV. Hollywood responded to an unprecedented demand for content during Covid by disappearing up their navels about gender and race. An incredible waste of billions of dollars and millions of man-hours.