Ben Nedivi writes alternate history with his partner Matt Wolpert, and For All Mankind is the clearest case: careful with the hardware, patient with the people, slow to start and good once it arrives. We rate the idea more than the pacing.
Fi1m perspective
In the summer of 1969 a Soviet cosmonaut reaches the moon first, and NASA watches on television like everyone else. That is the opening move of For All Mankind (2019), which Ben Nedivi created with Matt Wolpert and Ronald D. Moore, and it is his whole method in one scene: change a single fact, then follow the people it lands on for as long as it takes. In this case, decades. The series keeps the space race going past the point where ours stopped, and the scripts are as interested in what that does to a marriage in Houston as to a lander on the moon.
He has never worked alone. Nedivi met Wolpert at New York University and the two have been staffed together since 2007. His first staff job was on Entourage (2008–2009); together they wrote and produced on Fargo from 2014 to 2017, then on American Crime Story and The Umbrella Academy. We rated Fargo highly, but it is Noah Hawley's programme and an anthology besides, and we could not honestly tell you which of its scenes are Nedivi's. For All Mankind is where his hand shows. He has run it since its third season, and in 2026 he and Wolpert took the same universe to the Soviet side in Star City, which we have not seen.
What works is the long game. Nedivi and Wolpert write for time jumps and large casts, and the show's habit of skipping years between seasons is a writer's choice rather than a producer's: it lets a character's mistake in one year become the politics of the next. The hardware is treated with respect and the science is checked. The trouble is the pace on the way there. The first season of For All Mankind spends six episodes moving at the speed of a committee, most of it men being unhappy in kitchens, and even admirers of the later seasons have wondered whether the story has grown wider faster than it has grown quicker. We will admit that when the show finally went back to the moon and stayed there, and turned its attention to the women's programme, we cared more than the previous six hours had led us to expect, and we were slightly annoyed at having been made to wait.
Nedivi has said that "every season we have that goal of that crazy thing we're going to do at the end." That is the shape of his television: a slow approach and a large finish. Whether the finish repays the approach depends on how much you enjoy the walk. We think it does, just, and we would rather he trusted his people to be interesting before the rockets go up.
Biography
Ben Nedivi is a television writer and producer. His credits include writing four episodes of the FX series Fargo (2015–2017) and serving as co-executive producer and consulting producer on the show.
He is co-creator, writer and executive producer (showrunner) of the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind (2019–), for which he has also contributed stories and teleplays. Earlier writing credits include episodes of The Umbrella Academy (2019), About a Boy (2014) and Entourage (2008–2009), as well as the screenplay for the film Wicked Little Things (2006). He received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Fargo and a Writers Guild of America award for the series.
