‘Star City’ Review: A Taut Cold War Spy Drama Hiding Inside A Space Race Story

Anyone who has spent time with Cold War spy films, or more recent series like The Americans or Chernobyl — and especially those with a taste for Russian and Eastern European cinema from that era — will recognize the universe that Star City inhabits from its very first frames. Cavernous, half-empty offices. Muted, airless palettes. Serious, worried people perpetually concealing something. And cold — an unrelenting cold. Soviet bureaucracy in all its shades of gray provides the backdrop for a series nominally about something far more epic and romantic: the conquest of outer space.

A little context goes a long way before diving into Star City‘s excellent first season — though it isn’t strictly required. The series, created by Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi, is a spin-off of For All Mankind, Apple TV+’s 2019 alternate-history drama that recently concluded its fifth season. That series imagines a world in which the Soviets beat the Americans to the Moon, then traces the cascading consequences for the space race and, in more ways than one, the future of humanity itself. Star City rewinds to the beginning of that same story — only now told from the Soviet side, intersecting at key points with characters and events from the original series without requiring any prior familiarity with it. Everything begins here, with the clandestine arrival of the first man (a Russian) on the Moon, and unfolds from there.

The title comes from the real classified location where the Soviet space program was developed in total secrecy. Pulling the technological strings there — though not the political ones — is the Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans), a fictionalized version of Sergei Korolev, the figure most responsible for the Soviet space program in reality. The key difference: the historical Korolev died in 1966, leaving the program in disarray, whereas in Star City he lives, works, and continues to direct missions into orbit. The series’ second major mission concerns the first woman on the Moon.

The show distributes its attention across a large and gradually converging ensemble. At the center is Irina Morozova (Agnes O’Casey), a young woman who works in a grim office tasked with monitoring the private conversations of everyone in the program — hunting for spies, defectors, and anyone passing intelligence to the Americans. Her demanding supervisor, Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin), keeps the entire team under extreme pressure. Irina’s initial assignment is to surveil the cosmonauts Valya Mironov (Adam Nagaitis) and his wife Tanya (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) — and the strangest thing she discovers is that Tanya is conducting an affair with fellow cosmonaut Sasha Polivanov (Solly McLeod).

Meanwhile, the program’s surveillance apparatus has tortured a confession out of Yana Akhmatova (Niamh Algar) — the astronaut originally slated for a key mission — falsely branding her a spy and replacing her with the timid and inexperienced Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert). Even once the fabrication becomes clear, the KGB refuses to acknowledge its error and presses on. The mission proceeds, problematically, but meets its objectives. And Anastasia’s life will intersect with the other love triangle in ways no one anticipated.

Everything accelerates when a device is discovered aboard one of the spacecraft, transmitting signals that were never installed by the Soviets. Suddenly everyone is a suspect, and Irina is tasked with tracking down its origin — a mission that pushes her dangerously close to the very people she’s supposed to remain detached from. Anastasia quietly agonizes over the memorized lunar surface protocols she can’t commit to memory. The Chief Designer, nominally the man in charge, exercises remarkably little actual control over what goes on inside his own creation. And Lyudmilla, the closest the show has to a conventional antagonist — at least for now — is already sketched with enough ambiguity to complicate easy readings.

Star City renders its Cold War environment with conviction: scenes spanning the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, a world with almost no room for joy or celebration. The applause that follows a successful mission fades almost immediately into suspicion and dread. This isn’t merely a state secret tied to space exploration — it’s a way of life, a political system that has, by this point, become functionally indistinguishable from a prison.

The choice to have Soviet characters speak in British-accented English is a familiar, slightly awkward convention, but Star City earns its credibility through the authority of its world-building — its design, its tone, its unyielding severity. It takes a couple of episodes to fully orient oneself within the series’ web of characters and allegiances, but once the picture coheres, it plays like a descendant of the great Cold War spy cycles. Those versed in that tradition — films like The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, or The Russia House, all adapted from Le Carré, or even Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s sprawling DAU project — will find obvious points of contact. For everyone else, The Americans is the more accessible reference: the same grinding, pervasive paranoia, set against a backdrop of technological wonder and deadly secrecy.

Star City is another Apple TV+ series that deserves far more attention than it will probably get. Don’t let it pass you by.