How ‘Star City’ Turned the Soviet Space Program Into TV’s Most Thrilling Puzzle Box

Editor’s Note: This story contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of “Star City.”

Showrunners Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert have never met a situation they can’t turn into an Apollo 13-style puzzle box. For nearly a decade, they’ve been telling stories of driven astronauts and scrappy scientists, doing their best against impossible odds, the machinations of nations and politicians, the double-edged limitations of technology, and the myriad ways outer space wants to kill us. 

They’re still doing that on “Star City,” which takes the Soviet side of the Space Race alternate universe that Nedivi and Wolpert co-created with Ronald D. Moore in “For All Mankind.” Throughout the Apple TV series’ first season, the show delights in forcing its characters to solve all sorts of problems revolving around sending cosmonauts up on extremely short notice, or without space suits, or landing in Siberia in time to come face-to-face with bears. 

If anything, Nedivi and Wolpert wonder whether the show does enough to capture how crazy some of the early Soviet missions to space actually were. These inspired the writers to dream about “Star City” from almost the start of their research for “For All Mankind” and well before HBO’s “Chernobyl” dramatized some courageous ingenuity against life-and-death stakes behind the Iron Curtain with alluringly brutal visuals. “[The Soviets] were the true cowboys,” Nedivi told IndieWire on a recent episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. 

“The cold open of ‘Star City’ is [based on the fact that Cosmonaut Yuri] Gagarin’s wife found out that he was in space after he was up there. In America, there’s this whole pomp and circumstance, and in the Soviet Union, it’s secret even from his spouse up until the last second,” Wolpert told IndieWire. “A lot of [the inspiration for the show] was driven by those true stories —  the secret magic sauce of ‘Star City’ is that the Soviet program was so secretive that we don’t know [so much of] what happened.” 

Part of the magic is that the secrecy of the real-life Soviet program gives Nedivi, Wolpert, and their writers ample leeway to be inventive and distance themselves from the lore of their own alternate-universe timeline. Younger versions of characters from “For All Mankind,” such as Irina Morozova (Agnes O’Casey) and Sergei Nikulov (Josef Davies), do appear. But “Star City” is as much a spy story as it is about space, and much more about people trying to do their best inside of an authoritarian system that is as suspicious of science and creativity as it is ruthless in enforcing its total control. 

‘Star City’ Apple TV+

“ Honestly, up until we were shooting, we were like, ‘They’re gonna call us up at any point and say, ‘Guys, psych. We’re just kidding. This is crazy,’” Wolpert said. “The story is one that’s more relevant than ever because it really was about the kind of things happening both [in the Soviet space program] and in some of the politics around the world about the creep of authoritarianism and how people are struggling with less freedom.” 

Period shows are always actually about the present. 

The espionage and thriller elements dramatically shift the tone of “Star City” away from “For All Mankind” and cast a sometimes ominous, sometimes elegiac shadow over all of its space exploration. The finale largely concerns the reappearance of the Chief Designer’s (Rhys Ifans) secret shuttle Venera, presumed destroyed, but actually able to complete a tour of Venus; what’s happened to its crew; and what will happen to them if they fall into government hands on their return, given the unauthorized nature of the mission and the fact that cosmonaut Valya (Adam Nagaitis) has been a mole for the West this whole time. 

The space race in Episode 8, “The Wolves,” has nothing to do with international rivalries and everything to do with whether the Chief Designer, Sergei, Anastasia (Alice Englert), and Stepanov (Sam Troughton) can guide surviving cosmonauts Sasha (Solly McLeod) and Lakshmi (Priya Kansara) to land safely in neutral Finland before implacable KGB Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin), among others, can capture them. 

‘Star City’ Apple TV+

All you really need to know about “Star City” is that this involves multiple improvised space capsule landings, jet missile launches, a jeep chase, a shoutout to the real story of Yuri Gagarin touching down in a farmer’s field, a set of emotionally wrenching character choices, and some truly unhinged organ work by composer Federico Justid. That’s the show. 

“People don’t talk about this a lot, but when you score a movie, it’s two hours of music. On TV, you’re doing eight hours, 10 hours of score. It’s an insane amount. So a lot of times composers rely on synths to recreate instruments they already have or a library of instruments. Federico refused to do this. He would use live instruments, and every time we’d give notes, he’d have to bring musicians back to address them,” Nedivi said. “We kept telling Federico, ‘This is madness.’” 

But the madness behind the scenes is also part of the magic of what makes “Star City.” Maybe the only important thing that the Apple TV show shares with “Chernobyl” is its choice of shooting location and local crew. The production design team, headed by Paul Spriggs, continually went above and beyond. 

Towards the end of the shoot, the story requires Anastasia to fly up to the Soviet space station, from where she is perfectly positioned to both relay the change in landing coordinates to Sasha and, for the two of them, forced into an arranged marriage by the space program, to share one tortured goodbye now they’ve realized that they do love each other. But the production was up against deadlines, and the showrunners knew it would be unreasonable to ask the team to build them a whole space station for just a couple of scenes. 

‘Star City’ Apple TV+

“We were like, ‘Look, we’ll shoot her in a corner. Just give us a corner of the space station, and we’ll do an exterior VFX shot and just that corner, and it’ll be fine,” Wolpert said. “The Lithuanian art department was like, ‘Screw that.’ They built the whole space station. They literally built the whole thing, and we walked on set, and it was mind-blowing what they pulled off.”  

“I think that’s one of the quiet MVPs of the show, the production design. There’s not a huge crew base there, so they were using companies that build buildings and gas stations, and these people were emotionally invested in the show because they don’t get projects like this a lot. They were all going, ‘You know what? We can do it,’” Nedivi said. “ No one chose the easy path. And I think in television, if there is a key to getting things right, it’s doing it the hard way.”  

“Star City” Season 1 is available to stream on Apple TV.