Displaying items by tag: drama

I’ve said many times now here on The Digital Bits how much I appreciate Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald D. Moore’s For All Mankind.

As the series completes its fifth and penultimate season, the Apple TV Original has quietly become one of my all-time TV favorites, equaling Moore’s own rebooted Battlestar Galactica and even Star Trek, a franchise I love dearly but that—over the decades—has proven wildly uneven, and more recently has lost its way.

When I say this out loud, I’m typically greeted with two reactions. The first is surprise, as many viewers still either haven’t heard of the show, or haven’t yet given it serious consideration. But they should.

The second reaction—which I’m pleased to say is much more common today than in 2019, when the show first aired—is a kind of quiet understanding. Because if you know about the series… you know.

For All Mankind is, of course, an alt-history, science fiction ensemble drama that asks a simple question: What if the Soviet Union had beaten America to the Moon in 1969?

More broadly, it’s a series that attempts to realistically depict humanity’s slow, difficult, but hopefully inevitable climb out of Earth’s gravity well to become a spacefaring civilization.

Now… when I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, that outcome seemed like a foregone conclusion.

The first human spaceflight, Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok 1, happened six years before my birth. NASA’s Apollo 11 astronauts walked on the Moon two years after it, which means I’m just old enough to remember watching the Apollo 17 astronauts leaving the Moon for the last time on TV in 1972—one of my earliest memories.

Soon after this, I discovered the original Star Trek, a series that fed my young imagination exactly what it craved at exactly the right time. And I watched each new NASA mission that followed with eager intensity: Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, and the early Space Shuttle flights. [Read on here...]

Welcome to a new edition of Pick-Ups!

Thank you for tuning in. Sorry for my absence, but I’ve been on a bit of a vacation. My Mom came down to visit with us, so our focus was on spending some time with her.

While she was here, we did manage to catch Keanu and Captain America: Civil War at the theater. Both were enjoyable and definitely going out and seeing if you haven’t yet (I’m sure most of you have seen the latter movie by now). [Read on here…]

Welcome back to my Dailies feature, Pick-Ups!

It’s designed to feature older Blu-ray and DVD releases that we haven’t gotten around to reviewing until now (sorry about that!), as well as highlight select international releases and other unique titles on disc.

I try to do this column on a weekly basis, so be sure to check back regularly for more titles that are worthy of your attention.  [Read on here...]