Of these I've only watched Foundation and I was unhappy with it. Salvor "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" Hardin solves every problem with punches and guns. The overall plot is the worst kind of mystery box and it totally drops the central themes of lifecycles of empires.
Of those, Foundation is the only one I wouldn't recommend at all. It might be middling if it was named something else but as a show that purports to be Foundation it's a complete insult to the books.
But the other shows, especially For All Mankind are really great.
For those who start For All Mankind, stick with it until the end of episode 2. I dropped out after episode 1 a while ago, thinking it was interesting but a little too slow and everyone was just moping around, but when I gave it a shot again by the end of episode 2 I was hooked and have binged all 4 seasons since.
I had a very similar experience, watched a bit of episode 1 and didn't really like it - went back and watched it again and really got into it and its probably my favourite long running show at the moment.
Yes, I really wish they hadn't done that Karen/Danny subplot. It was a cheap way of introducing tension between characters that didn't add anything to the show.
If it were most other show, this particularly subplot would have made me quit but this show is so good otherwise that I still follow it despite this.
> it totally drops the central themes of lifecycles of empires.
I don't get this. The cycling of one empire ("Empire") to another ("Foundation") is ALL of the series. How can it drop it if that's what it's all about every single episode?
> totally drops the central themes of lifecycles of empires.
That theme is very much out of fashion, you even have people trying to argue that the Roman Empire never went into decline. Everything always gets better, because technology, the inevitability of progress, etc. Anybody who worries about decline is a reactionary, etc.
Personally I think it fell out of fashion because it makes Americans nervous. It's more comforting to think that we're at "the end of history" and American global hegemony will be forever. The Foundation is just too challenging for modern audiences.
That's the thing I liked the most about the books. It was so painfully obvious that empires fall and rise that a mere human could predict the details of how it would happen. It's hand wavy sci-fi, but it's a fun setting and it does really push the point. The change in rhetoric, stagnation of culture, centralization of wealth, talks of secession, they're all markers of a declining empire. It's already happened.
Foundation suffers from it's origins as a series of disjointed short stories in the pulp magazines of the era that were later lightly edited into books. They are chock full of generic characters standing around discussing interesting ideas with very little action.
There was no way to turn it into a television show without major rewrites.
However, Invasion is my call for the weakest scifi show they've done.
Hard agree. I never bothered to look it up, because we were so disappointed, but it was like they changed writers or show-runners to people who didn't appreciate the material, but everything we liked about the first season was changed.
No more slow burn mystery, with lots of character-based world-building, and protagonists out of their depth putting things together from a limited perspective (with the audience usually one step - but only one - ahead of them). The second season is action heavy, with characters reduced to tropes who seem to have had a knowledge download and all become "special".
I've seldom been more disappointed in a continuation of something I loved.
