Apple TV’s Best Sci-Fi Show Just Took a Sly Swipe at Netflix — and Nailed It

Apple TV+ just lobbed a delightfully nerdy grenade into the streaming wars. In the first minutes of For All Mankind Season 5 — which premiered this past weekend — the show’s signature alt-history news montage takes a swing at our real world by imagining a future where Blockbuster is thriving, Netflix is nowhere to be found, and the moon is getting its first video store. Subtle? Not even a little. Fun? Absolutely.

Where the show drops us now

For All Mankind, Apple’s longest-running series and, honestly, its best, has always used its opening montage to fast-forward the timeline. The series lives in a world where the Soviets beat the U.S. to the moon, which supercharged the space race and nudged everything from politics to pop culture onto a different track. Season 5’s opener pushes the story to the edge of our present day and stuffs a lot of context into blink-and-you-miss-it headlines.

• Big plot fallout: The aftermath of the Goldilocks heist is still reshaping the board.
• White House shake-up: The 2004 presidential winner is not incumbent Al Gore.
• Mars gets crowded: Refugees are now arriving on the red planet.
• Culture detour: John Lennon never died and just swept the Grammys alongside Jay-Z thanks to their hit joint album.
• Sports shuffle: The Montreal Expos are headed to Portland instead of Washington, D.C.
• Blockbuster, but make it lunar: The chain is expanding to the moon, after posting profits for the past four quarters.
• The new boss: Blockbuster was bought five years ago by FrameSkip, a holo-entertainment platform — basically a futuristic stand-in for streaming that doesn’t exist here.
• Originals era: Blockbuster plans to drop one original feature film and a premium scripted TV series by year’s end, with the show rumored to be set in American politics. You can practically hear the House of Cards theme.
• Mars retail therapy: Blockbuster is eyeing an expansion to Mars too, where brands are already popping up — there’s even a Domino’s at Happy Valley.

So... what happened to Netflix?

In our timeline, the late 2000s were a slow death march for Blockbuster and a rocket ride for Netflix. In For All Mankind’s timeline, it looks flipped: Blockbuster never lost its grip, then leveled up under FrameSkip. Netflix? Either it never broke out or it got steamrolled so thoroughly the montage doesn’t bother to name it.

There’s one teasing line that complicates things a bit, suggesting competitors do exist in this universe, just not as winners:

Blockbuster has done 'something none of the streaming giants did.'

We don’t get the rest of that sentence, but the implication is clear: other streamers are around, they just didn’t do whatever Blockbuster/FrameSkip pulled off. If Netflix is out there, it’s small, swallowed, or on life support.

Why this jab lands

The show’s moonshot at streaming hits a nerve because, here on Earth-Prime, the last 15 years have been defined by everyone chasing Netflix. Most studios spun up their own platforms (Disney even has more than one), plenty crashed and burned, and consolidation is closing in. Apple TV+ is one of the few still trying the slow-and-steady approach — spending big, taking losses, and actually letting shows find an audience instead of canceling them the second a chart dips. For All Mankind thriving into Season 5 is Exhibit A.

Apple in the For All Mankind universe

The montage all but confirms Apple still exists over there — and is arguably more advanced thanks to the accelerated tech curve in this timeline. Which raises a fun question: if Blockbuster is making originals and FrameSkip is the platform, does Apple TV+ also exist in some form in this world? Would not be shocked if a future headline winks back at us with a meta joke about a show that asks: What if America won the moon race?

Either way, a Blockbuster on the moon is the kind of detail this show lives for: sharp, cheeky, and loaded with commentary about how different small pivots can make the present look. Also, if they don’t stock late fees in low gravity, we riot.