The eight-episode American television series “City of Stars,” the first of which was broadcast on the Apple TV platform on demand, last May 29, uses the real Soviet cosmonaut training center, located near Moscow, as a backdrop for exciting dramatic events filled with conspiracies, tragedy, and KGB repression.
“City of Stars” is located about 40 kilometers from the Russian capital, and remains a place shrouded in mystery to this day. The makers of the series inspired their work from the real achievements of the Soviet space program, which was able to send the first human into space. However, the writers of the series, Ben Nedevi and Matt Woolpert, turn the history of space upside down in a fictional world, through elements that are sometimes strange.
Their innovative story – about an astronaut landing on the moon, with some similarities to the original series – is told not from an American perspective, but from a Soviet perspective, with great attention to detail, and the hour-long episodes were filmed in Lithuania, which was once part of the Soviet Union.
The setting of the events takes the viewer to the atmosphere of the Soviet Union during the sixties and seventies of the last century. At that time, the real Moscow was not working to send anyone to the moon, but it achieved successive record achievements in the battle of regimes during the Cold War, which led to Washington’s frustration. The “City of Stars” series also shows the dark side of those many victories.
