Bonus Tape from Our Interview with Moonrise Creator Lillian Cunningham

I interviewed Lillian Cunningham, Washington Post reporter and creator of the limited-run podcast Moonrise, on October 29. That was just three days before Apple released the first episode of For All Mankind, the counterhistorical drama series on Apple TV+ about an alternative world in which the Soviets beat the Americans to the moon. (Not to be confused with For All Mankind, the 1989 Al Reinart documentary, which is totally worth checking out, by the way.)

Lillian devoted great swaths of Moonrise to the largely forgotten history of the Soviet space program, and especially its presiding genius, Sergei Korolev. So I wanted to ask her whether she thought the premise of For All Mankind was at all realistic. You can hear her answer in this bonus interview tape.

We also went down the rabbit hole about the mechanics of producing Moonrise. I wanted to know how many people were involved in producing the show (the answer: a lot, but really just two, Lillian and her producer Bishop Sand) and who wrote the music (again: Bishop Sand). “We kind of wanted to show to have a retro, sci-fi feel to it," Lillian says. “Bishop did a beautiful job figuring out how to make it sound really different.”

Finally, we talked about Lillian’s writing process, how many of episodes were in the can before the show debuted and how many were written in real time, and how she was able to bookend the show so beautifully with the idea that “beginnings can manipulate” and “endings can manipulate.”