Do you remember the 1976 episode of The Six Million Dollar Man titled “The Price of Liberty”? I do. I remember sitting on the tile floor of my childhood home in Puerto Rico watching a Spanish-dubbed Steve Austin use his bionic powers to save America’s historic Liberty Bell. The broadcast was part of a slew of special episodes from prime-time shows celebrating the nation’s Bicentennial. I also remember being 11 and desperately wishing to live in a country that contained such wonders, if they would have me.
Fifty years later, on the occasion of the United States’ 250th anniversary, with the nation experiencing something of an identity crisis amidst a fractured media landscape, I’m not surprised at the lack of a concerted patriotic programming effort on the level of the 1976 Bicentennial, when TV shows from The Waltons to Maude took time from their busy seasons to observe the country’s milestone birthday.
That is not to say that, in the year of our Lord 2026, the Spirit of ’76 is going by unremarked on television. Indeed, at a moment when the country is flirting with a nationalist vision that is at odds with its founding ideals, Apple TV’s For All Mankind has been quietly examining, reimagining, and ultimately affirming those very ideals as it spins an alternate history of the space race that has also doubled as a story about America, or, more accurately, the idea of America.
Beginning with the Soviets beating the Americans to the Moon in 1969, For All Mankind follows the history-altering ripples from that fictional seminal event over the decades through the eyes of an evolving cast of characters who keep pushing deeper into the cosmos. It is a human drama told on an epic, generation-spanning scale, with some truly bonkers space-action sequences thrown in for good measure.
The title itself, with its callback to President Kennedy’s famous “We choose to go to the Moon” speech, drips with that unique brand of sanguine American optimism that cannot help but see United States supremacy in any field as a victory for all mankind. Even as the show goes to some dark places, the series’ general disposition remains aspirational, openhearted, and emblematic of the United States’ mythology at its best.
However, For All Mankind‘s American roots go deeper than Kennedy’s New Frontier. Indeed, the show frames space exploration in a positively Jeffersonian way. From the Moon to Mars and beyond, several of the principal characters see these excursions as more than mere scientific endeavors. When one character refers to Mars as a place where he and his compatriots can be “truly” in control of their own destiny, he could be channeling America’s 3rd president, Thomas Jefferson, who saw an “empire of liberty” in the unexplored lands beyond the young country’s western frontier.
In For All Mankind, America finds its fullest expression not in its own country, but on Mars.
By 2012 in the show’s alternate timeline, about 5,000 people live and work on Mars under the jurisdiction of the “Mars-6 Alliance”, a six-nation coalition that includes the United States and a still-alive-and-kicking Soviet Union. The coalition’s objective is to extract Martian mineral resources for use on Earth. Not surprisingly, at least to those familiar with American history, tensions rise between Earth’s mercantile objectives and the interests of the Martian settlers who have coalesced over the years into what one character calls “a living, breathing society”.
In a March 2026 interview with Vulture, showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi admit that the show is not trying to be subtle about the parallels between the situation on Mars and that of the American colonies back in the day, especially when it comes to the increasing use of force by the Mars-6 Alliance to protect the interests of Earth. In their telling, the Mars arc is all about the “building resentments of people who are being controlled from afar.”
Perhaps the largest parallel to the young United States is how, over its last three seasons—since humans first landed on the Red Planet—For All Mankind has seen a disparate group of characters organically, almost imperceptibly, take on a new identity. As we reach the end of the latest season, these characters no longer think of themselves as Americans, Russians, or North Koreans, or even as being “from Earth”. They have become something new.
“This is our home. We are the people of Mars. We speak as one,” is how this new polis signs off on a broadcast to Earth during a moment when tensions are near a breaking point. Not exactly e pluribus unum, but you get the gist.
250 years ago, the United States became the first country in history to test the idea that, as on Mars, a people can be forged from the union of diverse individuals committed to peacefully governing themselves in a manner that respects and defends each other’s inalienable right to self-determination. The result was a new national identity, one not based on blood, ethnicity, or soil.
“The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders, are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American,” is how proud Virginia patriot Patrick Henry put it in 1774. For his part, George Washington, on the occasion of his farewell, as the first president of the brand-spanking-new United States of America, put the matter of the new identity thusly: “The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation.”
From the beginning, immigration was central to this new identity. Even as some of the architects of the bold idea that became the United States did not fully appreciate the implications of the bell they had just rung, others certainly did. Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” would be populated by, among others, “the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions,” as Washington wrote in 1783. Nothing could be less American than refusing admission to someone looking for a better life. Not for nothing, Thomas Paine referred to the new nation on the shores of North America as an “asylum for mankind“.
As legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk puts it in Ken Burns’ 2025 PBS documentary, The American Revolution: “The Declaration of Independence was deeply significant to people at the margins.” The centrality of immigration to the idea of America is not lost on For All Mankind.
SUB-HEADER
In the very first episode of For All Mankind, as the world waits with bated breath to learn the fate of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission landing the first Americans on the Moon, we see a group of Mexican migrants make their way to the United States under the cover of the very same moon. Among these migrants is a young girl who will go on to become a major player in the For All Mankind saga. Aleida Rosales’ arc – from undocumented minor to NASA engineer to CEO of the show’s space-faring private company (and SpaceX stand-in), Helios – is one of the most fascinating in the current TV landscape, due in no small part to actress Coral Peña’s fierce performance.
Speaking of Helios, another fascinating character looking to the frontier for liberation is the company’s founder, tech mogul Dev Ayesa, played with intellectual cool by Edi Gathegi. As the American son of African immigrants, with a media-ready middle-class-to-riches story, Dev is the poster child for the American Dream and the last person on Earth anyone would describe as yearning to breathe free.
That explains the widespread shock that follows his decision to move to Mars permanently in the middle of the show’s fourth season. When his mother pleads with him to reconsider, Dev puts his cards on the table: “We’re doing something important up there. We’re building a new world, and it’s better than this one,” perhaps thinking of the coda to Common Sense where Thomas Paine saw in the young United States nothing less than the “power to begin the world over again“. (Talk about sanguine optimism!)
It is perhaps ironic that on the occasion of the nation’s 250th anniversary, many Americans appear to have given up on the idea of America. Even the country’s own vice president is having second thoughts. During a speech at The Claremont Institute in 2025, the man who is a heartbeat away from the presidency openly objected to the expansive view of America put forth by Jefferson, Henry, Washington, and Paine, describing it as “overinclusive” because it would “include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreigners” (the horror!).
JD Vance is not alone, joining many others inside and outside the Trump administration who tacitly, and sometimes not so tacitly, endorse the current president’s hostile approach to immigrants (especially the black and brown kind), from publicly demeaning Haitians in Ohio to terrorizing Hispanics in Minnesota via his ICE shock troops.
In this context, For All Mankind‘s sci-fi reprise of the American story serves as a compelling corrective to the nativism currently peddled by those in charge, a counternarrative of the United States that seeks to rescind the explicit invitation the founders extended to the whole world to come and join the American project of liberty. This is an invitation I accepted when I permanently settled in the United States 12 years after watching Steve Austin save the Liberty Bell, leaving blood and soil behind in search of a more perfect union.
In other words, For All Mankind is having a #Reisist moment. And during the nation’s 250th anniversary, no less.
As the latest season of For All Mankind closes with Martian explorers discovering life on one of Saturn’s moons, it will be interesting to see how the newly independent people of Mars conduct their own settler-colonial enterprise. Maybe it will be the case that, as another signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush prophetically observed in 1787, only a handful of years after the war that gave birth to the nation: “The revolution is not over.“
Works Cited
We Choose to Go to the Moon (1962). Rice and NASA | JFK 60th Anniversary. Rice University.
Jefferson, T. Letter to George Rogers Clark, 25 December 1780. Founders.Archives.Gov.
Brookover, S. ‘For all mankind’ premiere recap: ‘First light’. Vulture. 27 March 2026.
Adams, J. Notes of Debates in the Continental Congress from the Diary of John Adams. Founders.Archives.Gov. 6 September 1774
Washington, G. Farewell Address. Founders.Archives.Gov. 19 September 1796.
Washington, G. Letter to Joshua Holmes. Rotunda Upress Virginia. 2 December 1783.
Paine, Thomas. 1776: Paine, Common Sense (pamphlet). Libertyfund.org. 10 January 1776.
Burns, Ken, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, directors. The American Revolution. PBS. 2025.
Vance, JD. “American statesmanship for the golden age”. The American Mind. 15 July 2025.
Herman, A. “‘They’re eating the cats’: Trump rambles falsely about immigrants in debate”. The Guardian. 11 September 2024.
Offenhartz, J. “Reports of immigration agents in disguise stoke fears in Minnesota”. AP News. 8 February 2026.
Rush, Benjamin. Address to the people of the United States. Teaching American History.org. January 1787.