Why Apple TV's For All Mankind Is Ending With Season 6

One of the best sci-fi TV shows on Apple TV is finally back, as "For All Mankind" is returning for its fifth season this week. Created by Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi, the series takes place in an alternate timeline where in the Soviet Union reached Earth's moon before the U.S. This creates a ripple effect that causes the space race to never end, with science and technology becoming the global priority for the benefit of all humanity.

Jump to the present, and "For All Mankind" season 5 is now going full anime. On top of a race to find alien life on Jupiter, tensions are boiling between the citizens of a Mars colony and their former home like something out of "Mobile Suit Gundam." It's a fantastical storyline, but "For All Mankind" has been setting it up for years. Moreover, the show at large continues to imagine how our own reality could conceivably come to resemble the "Star Trek" universe, with humanity uniting for a greater purpose: to explore the cosmos.

Unfortunately, it appears we'll never see Joel Kinnaman's Ed Baldwin become the first cyborg on "For All Mankind" or the show's version of the 2100s. That's because Apple TV's coolest sci-fi show just got renewed for season 6, which will also serve as the show's final season ... albeit, for a good reason.

As Wolpert told Variety, this renewal will allow "For All Mankind" to catch up to our present, at least in the show's timeline. "We wanted to tell the arc of the story from the initial divergence of 1969, and then reach the present moment, and see just how different the world we're in now could have been had we kept pushing for progress and kept pushing forward as a species," he explained.

Back in 2023, the creators of "For All Mankind" told Den of Geek their original intention was for the show to span roughly 70 years across seven seasons. That plan, of course, has changed slightly now that the series is concluding with season 6. Still, for those who're worried that this means the show's creatives will have to abandon their originally envisioned ending, fret not.

"Honestly, what's incredible is how close we're still to the roadmap we laid out with Ron [D. Moore] really early on," Ben Nedivi told Variety. "It's one thing to get this far. It's another thing to say that early roadmap is still our roadmap, which is not to say we haven't diverged and gone away from certain things and lost people. But we're still on that map, and it's been an incredible journey and I think the ending's gonna be something else."

The biggest asset of "For All Mankind" has always been time, particularly the way the show uses big time jumps to better develop its alternate timeline and illustrate how its characters have grown and changed. Indeed, characters both big and small come and go every season, with the older generation continually being phased out as younger players enter the stage and leave their mark on this universe. Heading into season 5, it's clear the grandkids of season 1's characters will similarly become a major focus of the story going forward.

That said, ending the show in the present-day  — and, in turn, holding up a mirror that reveals how our own world could be better — sounds like a pretty poignant way to wrap things up.

"For All Mankind" season 5 premieres March 27, 2026, on Apple TV.