I'm endlessly amused about how the most compelling aspects of Foundation are those disconnected from the source material. It's not how things go usually, but they made some great content.
To be fair Asimov himself kept us hanging with the books and only completed the series (making it worse imo), just because the commercial publishers wanted the money.
Indeed. One is an all time great science fiction series thats inspired a host of imitators. The other is whatever fluff Apple have bowdlerised its name with. It's genuinely closer to the YA fanfic level screenwriting of the new Star Trek series than Gibbon's Decline & Fall in space.
Asimov Foundation books near impossible to adapt to TV series or movies. It has no typical hero's arc. Even in Gibbon's Rome book you able to follow say Nero rise and downfall. As a generic idea book, Asimov books were ahead of his time. As a good scifi novel? He was several magnitudes below Cixin - and majority would even place Ursula way way higher than Asimov. Apple Foundation literally blast through Asimov story telling. To me, at least Apple succeeded as YA or within a potshot of Cixin. Asimov literally failed in adult scifi by today's standard. What holding you is nostalgia. Evaluate the story in contemporary terms.
I've read the "Second Foundation trilogy" written by other renowned sci-fi authors, as well as the later Foundation books written by Asimov. They had typical main characters with hero's arcs driving the story. I much preferred the originals.
Especially the first book. It's refreshing to read a story where events occur because of unstoppable historical forces instead of the superhuman actions of a hero.
If I wanted a story about a hero, I could read...well...just about any other book ever written.
A book doesn’t, and Foundation makes excellent use of every inch of the novel as a medium to explore itself, but the commenter above was specifically referring to what made the book difficult to adapt into a television series. And while Malick et all can def do “rumination on a theme” as a feature film, an ongoing tv series requires the audience to invest and keep coming back week after week, episode after episode.
Generally that takes the form of characters who experience things — ideally growing or changing in response, although many genres and formats don’t require that part. It’s unnecessary since part of the medium of television, unlike the novel, is people putting on a show to entertain you which is different from reading, an inherently more-individual experience. Part of what TV is selling is a group of people to hang out with every week. Generally.
Which is not to say always — shows like Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt proved the anthology format has a wide audience. But they had the advantage of a brand new paradigm each week, which creates a relationship with the show itself (but even TZ allowed the audience Serling).
Foundation def be done as anthology style episodes with some crossovers/overlap, but again practical realities make it difficult to guarantee narratively-necessary access to actors due to contract and scheduling factors, and you have the issue of both too big for standard structure and “not big enough” for a true anthology at its core. Not saying it couldn’t work it’d just be more difficult, which is not a quality that makes studios likely to invest.
I think your description of television much better fits the mould of 90's network TV (24 weekly episodes per year) than prestige era limited series or narrative arc TV. Foundation could absolutely be done as an anthology show in the vein of American Horror story - where each season covered an era of an unfolding narrative, with characters like Hari Seldon and R.Daniel recurring as audience favourites.
Either way though, there are issues with the adaptation that are quite distinct from eschewing the episodic arc of the original trilogy. It's full of spiritual woo for one, which is entirely antithetical to Azimov's vision. It's also more than fond of sadistic violence. Azimov's whole method as a writer was to have smart characters solve difficult problems intellectually. 'Violence is the last resort of the incompetent' after all.
I hear where you’re coming from, but you will note that AHS, while being an anthology, pulls continuously from the same group of audience favorite actors — which goes back to the “people putting on a show” variant I described above. The audience has a relationship with those actors. Very meta, as befits a Ryan Murphy shindig.
That recurrence that wouldn’t be possible for a Foundation series without suggesting characters themselves are repeating through time, which would seem to lean even harder into woo, which I’m sensing is not your bag.
Agreed - but as I said with Foundations specifically, that you could change the characters each series and keep your anchor characters (i.e.: those that live on literally by being robots, or through projection). It's also pretty amenable to cutting back and forth in time. In other words multiple parallel timelines, which a number of shows have pulled off. There are enormous underserved audiences for clever complex formally innovative TV, and a whole bunch of money going into fluff that (at least in Apple's case, seems like it isn't drawing an audience now - let alone in future rereleases, as the prestige shows of the 90s did).
What's so interesting about Cixin? I could barely finish the books.
On goodreads Foundation (which IMHO is not even among the best Asimov works) is rated noticeably higher than The Three Body Problem, and as a reader I feel it is justified.
If you take into account the novelty factor, it will probably sink to the average rating of mediocrity in a couple of decades.
Having read all of Azimov - but only the Dark Forrest trilogy by Liu Cixin, I actually think they're more comparable than you suggest. Both are hard science fiction 'ideas men'. Fairly uncomfortable with deep characterisation or 'literary' writing. Capturing vast scopes of time and space in space operas that are somehow more charming and interesting than their broad scope and concept heavy setups have any right to be. Azimov is more of a well rounded intellectual - the man literally wrote hundreds of general knowledge and popular science books. And it shows in his depth of reference and context. Cixin seems more rooted (inevitably) in authoritarianism and historicism. These critiques are obviously subjective. I've greatly enjoyed the work of both, but Cixin has a long long way to go before he can demonstrate the longevity let alone influence of an Azimov. They do share one other thing in common though - the adaptations of their work have been enormously disappointing, arguably entirely missing the point of the original series.
Re: A hero's journey, hard disagree. There are numerous heroes in the original foundation series, and the later books have one very well drawn one - Golan Trevize, in addition to a host of memorable characters.
Agreed. Getting season 3 of Foundation is literally the only thing Eddy Cue needs to do. Hope he's reminded every day. Once Foundation is done, they can shut down all the Apple TV+ servers.
Rather put the money into an Apple Robot. The robot needs to have Eddye Cue eyes and that constant grin.
I'm curious how the next season will go, because from memory, they still have the back half of the first book to go, and fuck-all happens in it. Will they commit to a prequel season or try to string some plot together while telling the prequel story through flashbacks?
Dunno why people say it sucks, it's (no real spoilers) a genre staple ending pretty much. Leaves stuff open for a sequel, as they do, but still finishes off the main plot.
It'll get real interesting in the next two seasons (I've read the books). The world is really cool but story-wise the books do stuff you can't do on TV, so we'll see how they can wrangle it.
