AppleTV+ released a jaw-dropping trailer for Season 4 of For All Mankind on day one of New York Comic Con (NYCC 2023) yesterday. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch it below. Before they did, however, we had an opportunity to sit down with the show’s producers, including creator Ronald D. Moore, to talk about what goes in to making the visionary series. What it all boils down to is steeping the show in realism, despite its revisionist history themes.

“The further we get down our path, the more we’re diverging from what people remember,” Moore said of moving the story forward into the 2000s for Season 4. “You have to steer this course and have some grounding in what really happened.”

When writing For All Mankind, it’s all about picking up “historical truths” while also playing “what-if” with the series. One of the challenges for this season was taking the show into the post-9/11, real world timeframe. Executive Producer Ben Nedivi explained how the “Butterfly Effect” can be such a driving force of the show’s progression.

For All Mankind: rewriting history

“We definitely talked a lot about [9/11]. The international, geo-political focus on the Middle East [in the show] would have shifted in way that wouldn’t have driven that event to happen in our timeline.”

~ Ben Nedivi, Executive Producer of For All Mankind

For All Mankind Showrunner Matt Wolpert went on to explain. “We try on the show to touch base on the something in [the real world] era but through the prism of our show’s Butterfly Effect.”

For All Mankind; NYCC 2023
Image: Apple; Sony Pictures

On way they are able to keep the show grounded in reality, despite inching closer towards science fiction in Season 4, producers still strive to utilize real-world scenarios. In Season 4, we’ll not only see things from the astronauts’ perspective. We’ll witness how the events of the show affect real people. For All Mankind will feature a growing Martian colony, filled with people “leaving their families to support their families back home,” said Nedivi. “It’s a story a lot of Americans have experienced.”

Life imitating art

For All Mankind; NYCC 2023

Another aspect of the show’s realism is its design. Costume Designer Esther Marquis’s painstaking work on For All Mankind is a huge component of that…. So much so that Production Designer Seth Reed proudly admitted that she’d been invited to NASA to help design its next, real-world generation space uniforms.  In discussing her role, and the recent news that Prada would be assisting NASA in space suit design, she reminded us that fashion actually plays a huge, if unexpected role.

“When you look at… fashion brands, they have a long history of creating garments…. They also have wonderful technologies in terms of rubbers and glues and all of that.” Those are, of course, all crucial elements for both costume design for the show, and real-world application.

You can see it all come together when For All Mankind returns to AppleTV+ on November 10th.