Honesty time. It’s not great.
Half the year gone, and only one show didn’t feel like a chore to watch. You might think calling Star City pure fun is odd. It’s grim. Soviet history. KGB interrogations. Space accidents that kill. But somehow, it works. More on that in a sec.
The rest of the landscape is… burdened. Brilliant moments, sure. Just lots of baggage too.
Take Fallout. We were barely into 2026 when the show’s second season hit. Uneven? Understatement. The premise stays the same. A few rich bastards hid in underground vaults. Everyone else burned. Or mutated. Or just died trying.
Fallout’s uneven second act
Lucy is back. So is Max. And the Ghoul.
For the first two, it feels repetitive. Max toggles between hating and loving the Brotherhood of Steel. It’s exhausting to watch him pivot back and forth without growth. Lucy? She forgets everything.
All those near-death moments in season one. Gone. Instead she scolds the Ghoul for being too trigger-happy. She exists mostly as a foil. Not much else.
The Ghoul, however, carries the weight. He is the save point for Fallout. Charismatic. Relentlessly interesting.
We know the basics. He starred in westerns before the bombs dropped. He spent centuries looking for his wife. Still alive. But the new flashbacks are where it sings. A spy network. Trying to stop the war by assassinating a Vegas technocrat.
Masterclass storytelling. It’s the only reason Fallout remains worth your time.
“The flashbacks are a masterclass.”
Paradise vs. Tropes
Paradise faces the same “difficult second album” problem.
Season one had a killer twist. The dead president Cal Bradford? Not in a gated community. Buried alive in a mountain bunker. After civilization ended. It was a whodunnit machine.
Season two had a tough bar. It cleared it mostly. Even borrowed the “Ghoul-shaped” plot. Long-lost wife. Wandering the wasteland to find her. Xavier Collins, the protagonist, drives this bus. He’s a former Secret Service agent now turned general badass.
But the cheese is real. And it grates.
Sometimes the cast underdelivers compared to Sterling K. Brown as Xavier. Still. The show plays with tropes smarter than almost anything else. Bunker life last time. Post-apocalyptic scavenger this time. It knows what it’s doing.
For All Mankind’s decline
Then there is For All Mankind.
Unapologetically cheesy. Alternate history. The US and USSR kept spending billions on space. No cuts. Now it’s 2012 in this timeline. We’re on Mars. Trying for Titan. Looking for aliens.
The Baldwin family remains our anchor. Ed? Cantankerous astronaut from the Apollo days. He’s under arrest on Mars right now. Helped steal an asteroid full of iridium. That resource kept the Mars base alive. Earth didn’t like that.
So Earth sent threats. Specifically the strongman leaders of both superpowers.
Mars declared independence. Earth attacked. All-out war on the Red Planet sets the stage.
Did they do anything with it? No. Thrilling stunts. Sure. But narrative? Minor letdown. The potential squandered.
The one joy
Thank god for the spinoff. Star City.
It shares a universe. Splits off from real history because of one guy: Sergei Korolev.
In real life? He died in 1966. Soviet space program stagnated after that. Here? He lived.
He allowed the USSR to beat the US to the moon. Big difference.
Anastasia Belikova is our guide. First woman on the moon. Cosmonaut glory. Except life isn’t pretty.
She lands on Earth. Immediately punished. Why? For acknowledging Yana Akhmatovа. Another cosmonaut. Yana got pulled off the mission abruptly by the KGB. Anastasia said something about her. Bad move.
The KGB hunted Yana for being a mole. Wrong suspect. Agent Lyudmilla Raskova takes over the investigation. She zeroes in on Anastasia. And everyone else.
It is revelatory.
Anna Maxwell Martin plays Raskova with ice in her veins. Bone-chilling. Terrifying.
You don’t need For All Mankind context to get into it. No homework required. If you only watch one sci-fi show this year…
Well. Watch this one.
The others? Maybe next season. Maybe never.
