‘For All Mankind’ Season 6 Is Filming Now, and the Final Chapter Will Bring the Alternate History All the Way to 2020
Few science fiction series on television have managed to do what ‘For All Mankind’ has done across five seasons, building an alternate history of the space race that spans decades, shifts entire geopolitical landscapes, and treats the human cost of exploration with genuine dramatic weight. Created by Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi, the Apple TV+ drama has been one of the streamer’s most ambitious and enduring originals since it first launched in 2019, and it has spent every season since then leaping forward in time to chart how its divergent world evolved.
The show’s unique structure has seen each season jump roughly a decade ahead, with the space race long outlasting its real-world counterpart and eventually pushing humanity to Mars and beyond. Season 5 landed in the early 2010s, with a thriving Mars colony at the center of the action and growing friction between Earth governments and the independent-minded residents of Happy Valley. With the fifth season’s finale now behind viewers, the big question has naturally turned to where the show goes next.
According to a post from Apple TV News Hub on X, the final season of ‘For All Mankind’ will take place in 2020, with filming currently underway and the season set to release next year on Apple TV+. That 2020 setting has since been widely confirmed, with the creative team having always envisioned bringing the show’s alternate timeline fully into the modern era as the natural endpoint for the series. The season 5 finale already teased this direction, using The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” to transition the story into the year 2020 during its closing moments, a sequence that also suggested the abandoned Soviet spacecraft Mars-94 may be on a trajectory toward Saturn.
Apple officially confirmed the renewal on March 24, 2026, just days before the Season 5 premiere, announcing that the show would conclude with a sixth and final 10-episode run. In a statement released alongside the renewal, creators Wolpert and Nedivi expressed genuine gratitude, saying the opportunity to explore the ‘For All Mankind’ universe across six seasons had been an incredible privilege and that they were thrilled to finish the story exactly the way they had always hoped. Speaking to Collider, Nedivi also pushed back on years of speculation about a fixed seven-season plan, clarifying that the goal from the beginning was simply to get the story to the present day.
Cameras began rolling on the final season as early as March 16, 2026, ahead of the official renewal announcement, with Topher Grace, best known for his role on ‘That ’70s Show,’ confirmed to have joined the cast, though no character details have been released. Given the show’s heavy reliance on visual effects, detailed spacecraft designs, and large-scale space sequences, a lengthy post-production period is expected, with a mid-to-late 2027 premiere considered the most likely scenario.
The season 5 finale also pushed the series firmly into new territory by confirming the existence of methane-based life on Saturn’s moon Titan, and in its closing moments, hinted at the possibility of something far more complex lurking beneath the surface, setting up a final chapter that promises to be unlike anything the show has delivered before. For a series that began with a single divergence point in the summer of 1969, the prospect of finally seeing what that alternate world looks like in 2020 is one of the most compelling storytelling payoffs in recent prestige television history.
Whether or not the final season can live up to everything it has been building toward is the question every fan of this series is now sitting with, so sound off below with your biggest hope for how ‘For All Mankind’ ends its run.
