The archive · Content & Film · Marketing decision · 2022–2023
Apple turns For All Mankind's Mars sci-fi into a real-science companion series
While the show imagined a 1990s Mars, Apple released a companion series hosted by Wrenn Schmidt (Margo Madison) to explain the real science to fans.
Apple · Sony Pictures Television
What it had to solve
For All Mankind season 3 transports viewers to Mars inside an alternate, aspirational 1990s. The imagined history runs on genuine science, and Apple wanted to illuminate what fuelled the vision without breaking the show's spell.
How it works
For All Mankind season 3 moves Apple's alternate-history space race to Mars, set in a 1990s that never happened. The fiction is grounded in real engineering and physics, yet the genuine science behind it could easily stay invisible to fans.
Apple illuminated that science with The Science Behind For All Mankind, a companion series hosted by Wrenn Schmidt, who plays Margo Madison in the show. Instead of a detached explainer, it arcs narratively with the season and distils complex topics in the storytelling spirit of the series and Apple.
The result gave Apple TV+ a second layer of content: viewers could finish an episode, then follow the real science that fuelled the imagined history. The companion series is preserved in D&AD's awards archive as part of the 2023 Annual.
Why it lands
- Wrenn Schmidt's face already carried the show's authority, so the science series entered with trust rather than a cold-start lecture.
- Arcing with the season meant each instalment answered questions the newest episode had just raised.
- Distilling one complex topic at a time kept real science digestible for entertainment audiences.
- As a companion to the drama, it deepened fandom instead of interrupting it.
What it did
The companion series turned the season's boldest ideas into real science fans could follow, and the work is preserved in D&AD's awards archive as part of the 2023 Annual.
What you can take
When your story is fantasy built on truth, the truth is content too: an in-universe face explaining real science can extend the fiction and educate at once.
Since then
The Science Behind For All Mankind ran alongside season 3 and is preserved in D&AD's awards archive. It shows a streamer using its own fiction as the doorway to factual content rather than commissioning a separate documentary to do the explaining.
Sources
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe the brief you are staring at, and see who has been given the same problem.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card