If Star City left you paranoid about knocks on the door and convinced every phone line is bugged, you’re not alone. Apple TV’s Soviet space race spinoff of For All Mankind nails that specific mix of Cold War dread and human drama, and once you’ve burned through the finale, the withdrawal is real. I went digging for shows that scratch the same itch, whether it’s the espionage, the alternate history angle, or just that suffocating “someone is always watching” atmosphere. Here are 11 TV Shows Like Star City, worth adding to your watchlist.
1. For All Mankind
Genre: Sci-Fi Drama | Year: 2019–present | Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Michael Dorman, Sarah Jones, Wrenn Schmidt, Krys Marshall, Coral Peña | Where to Watch: Apple TV+
You can’t talk about Star City without starting here, since it’s the show Star City actually spun off from. For All Mankind imagines an alt-history where the Soviets land on the moon first, and the American side of the space race spirals into something far more desperate and competitive than what really happened. It’s the parent universe, so if you came to Star City without watching this first, you’re missing a ton of context that makes the Soviet side hit even harder.
2. The Americans
Genre: Spy Thriller Drama | Year: 2013–2018 | Cast: Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys, Noah Emmerich | Where to Watch: Hulu, Prime Video
If the KGB surveillance and double-agent paranoia in Star City is what hooked you, The Americans is basically the gold standard for that exact tension. It follows two Soviet spies posing as an ordinary American couple during the Cold War, and the show is legendary for how it balances domestic life with high-stakes espionage. It’s less about space and more about the spy game, but the atmosphere of constant secrecy will feel instantly familiar.
3. Counterpart
Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller | Year: 2017–2019 | Cast: J.K. Simmons, Olivia Williams, Harry Lloyd, Nazanin Boniadi | Where to Watch: Prime Video
This one swaps rockets for parallel dimensions, but the Cold War DNA is unmistakable. J.K. Simmons leads a story about two versions of Earth that split apart in 1987, with a tense standoff building between the two worlds ever since. It plays out almost like an espionage thriller between rival nations, which makes it an easy pick if the political intrigue in Star City was your favorite part.
4. 1983
Genre: Alternate History Thriller | Year: 2018 | Cast: Robert Więckiewicz, Maciej Musiał, Michalina Olszańska | Where to Watch: Netflix
For a deeper dive into what an extended Cold War might have looked like outside the US and USSR, this Polish series imagines a timeline where the Iron Curtain never fell. A law student and a state investigator end up uncovering a conspiracy tied to a terrorist attack that reshaped the country’s history, and the show jumps between two different decades to build out the alternate timeline. It’s a great pick if the “what if the Cold War never ended” angle is what pulled you into Star City in the first place.
5. Chernobyl
Genre: Historical Drama (Miniseries) | Year: 2019 | Cast: Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård, Emily Watson | Where to Watch: HBO Max
Nothing captures the specific dread of Soviet-era institutional secrecy quite like this one. It’s not about space, but the bureaucratic paranoia, the fear of speaking honestly to superiors, and the sense that the truth is constantly being managed and buried will feel extremely familiar after watching what the Chief Designer has to navigate in Star City.
6. Deutschland 83
Genre: Spy Thriller Drama | Year: 2015 | Cast: Jonas Nay, Maria Schrader, Sylvester Groth, Sonja Gerhardt | Where to Watch: Netflix
Swap the cosmonauts for a young East German soldier sent to spy in West Germany, and you’ve got another Cold War drama built around the same tightrope walk between duty and personal survival. The show leans hard into 1980s tension and the moral compromises spies are forced to make, which lines up well with everything Sergei and Stepanov go through in Star City.
7. Battlestar Galactica
Genre: Sci-Fi Drama | Year: 2004–2009 | Cast: Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, Katee Sackhoff, Jamie Bamber | Where to Watch: Peacock
Created by Ronald D. Moore, the same mind behind For All Mankind and Star City, this one trades the Soviet Union for killer robots, but the underlying DNA is the same. It’s a space opera soaked in Cold War-style paranoia, where survivors are never quite sure who around them can be trusted. If you like Moore’s storytelling instincts, this is required viewing.
8. The Expanse
Genre: Sci-Fi Drama | Year: 2015–2022 | Cast: Steven Strait, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Dominique Tipper, Wes Chatham | Where to Watch: Prime Video
This is more of a leap into hard sci-fi territory, set centuries in the future once humanity has spread across the solar system. But the political tension between competing factions plays almost like a modern Cold War in space, complete with conspiracies and power struggles that keep escalating. If you enjoyed the political maneuvering behind Star City’s space missions, this scratches a similar itch on a much bigger scale.
9. The Man in the High Castle
Genre: Alternate History Drama | Year: 2015–2019 | Cast: Alexa Davalos, Rufus Sewell, Luke Kleintank | Where to Watch: Prime Video
This one leans further into alternate history, imagining a world where the Axis powers won World War II and the United States is split under Japanese and German control. The espionage, the resistance movements, and the constant threat of being caught by the wrong people all echo what Star City’s characters live with daily, just transplanted into a different historical nightmare.
10. Ascension
Genre: Sci-Fi Mystery (Miniseries) | Year: 2014 | Cast: Tricia Helfer, Brian Van Holt, Gil Bellows | Where to Watch: Netflix
At the height of Cold War panic in the 1960s, this one imagines a secret spaceship launched to preserve humanity in case of nuclear disaster, with descendants of the original crew still aboard generations later. It functions like a murder mystery wrapped in space race politics, and its self-contained, everyone-is-a-suspect setting will feel right at home for anyone who liked untangling the conspiracies in Star City.
11. The Silent Sea
Genre: Sci-Fi Mystery Thriller | Year: 2021 | Cast: Bae Doona, Gong Yoo, Lee Joon | Where to Watch: Netflix
If you want to stay in space but shift the setting to a Korean sci-fi thriller, this one is worth the detour. A crew is sent on a covert mission to an abandoned lunar research station to retrieve a mysterious sample, and the deeper they dig, the more the mission turns into a story about buried secrets and institutional cover-ups. It’s got that same claustrophobic, trust-no-one tension that runs through Star City, just wrapped in a moodier, more atmospheric sci-fi package.
