For All Mankind season 5 pushes deeper into the red on Apple TV+

TL;DR

Apple TV+ has finally given us a date for For All Mankind season five! Our favourite alt-history space drama returns on 27 March 2026.

This time, Mars isn’t just a frontier outpost; it’s a bustling, rebellious colony pushing back against Earth’s rules. Joel Kinnaman is back as Ed Baldwin, leading a brilliant ensemble cast into a season that looks far more political and combustible than anything we’ve seen so far. Plus, Apple is expanding the universe with a Soviet-focussed spin-off, Star City, dropping in May.

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The frontier romance is officially over. Happy Valley is now a thriving 2010s colony with thousands of residents, and Earth wants to impose law and order. As always, For All Mankind is at its absolute best when political control clashes with out-of-the-box ambition.

Instead of cooking up a random new crisis, the show is smartly using its own rich history. You can’t treat Mars like a distant science project anymore, and the tensions are sky-high. We’ve got loads of brilliant returning faces – including Toby Kebbell and Wrenn Schmidt – giving the Mars years a beautifully dense, lived-in feel.

Behind the scenes, sci-fi legend Ronald D. Moore and showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi are still pulling the strings. It’s incredibly rare for a show to jump decades and shift political realities without losing its soul, but they’ve nailed it.

With the Star City spin-off on the horizon, Apple is treating this like a proper universe now. If season five keeps the political edge sharp while showing Mars as a truly contested civilisation, we’re in for an absolute blinder of a return.