Personally I kinda liked the first season. It’s better if you forget the original Asimov story and just watch it as its own thing because it diverges from it quite a bit.
Season 2 Full Trailer - Youtube
Looking forward to see where they go after that ballsy season 1 ending. Lee Pace will continue to kill it no doubt.
That episode with the middle emperor proving himself. Fucking amazing TV
I found that there were two stories, one with with emporers which was really compelling and another story with the Foundation which was really dull which is why I give it an overall rating of 5/10
I actually get the feeling this started out as a totally different series about an empire of clone rulers existing over millennia, and they struggled to sell it so they reworked it into a hodgepodge adaptation of bits from every major asimoverse book combined and time-shifted into one series.
I’ve read the whole series and absolutely love it, but I know that a direct adaptation would have been a failure.
I really enjoyed S1, they’ve taken some ideas from other Asimov universe series (Empire and Robots) and combined it into a pretty fascinating alternate take on the foundation universe.
It’s visually stunning, has some great acting and direction and I’m really looking forward to S2
“Aaand here’s episode 3, it’s 200 years later and all the characters you saw before are dead. Moving on!”
I would have enjoyed it, but I can very much understand why it wasn’t done that way. :)
I think it’s just as much a problem when reading the books. But the problem is that a TV show must succeed with a popular audience, whereas a book can please a niche audience.
I read the entire series as well. Seems pretty much on story line to me? They don’t go into as great of detail (kind of with they dug into the library’s work more and psychohistory), but seems pretty much what I remember.
“on story line” but with significant embellishing, and a fair bit of time changes.
The Genetic dynasty, demerzel and the rules of robotics (might be more addressed on this in s2…), the “terrorist” attacks on trantor, the “death” of seldon, the vault… etc…
Did robots come into play in Foundation? You did just remind me of the whole Robot series with Elijah Baley which was cool af. I guess that was in the same universe. Not sure I’d expect to see that in this TV series, though.
I’ve never heard of it before but I am gonna pick up the first book next week now.
Unfortunately I didn’t enjoy the 1st season, just like other commenters here. A preliminary reason could be that the story is very different from the book, which is one of my most favourite sci-fi books ever. But even simply seeing this series as something different from the book, if found it too cheap: the characters are half-stereotypes, the events are what you’d expect, usual blood and sex to attract viewers…
Should go without saying, just my personal opinion and tastes. I’m happy that others enjoyed the series and I hope it’ll made them curious to read the books.
I love the books. I’ve read the original trilogy three times, as well as heard the BBC radio dramatization (from the 1970s). My anticipation for this series was sky-high.
Halfway through Season One I stopped watching, baffled in an uninterested way about how they dropped everything that had the original Foundation spirit, I recognized the names of most characters and some planets, but everything in between was crammed with Goyer’s self-important posturing, insistence on mystery boxes and artificial cliffhangers.
The books will live on, they are immortal. The series, not so much, it will age quickly and badly.
Thank God we also have Villeneuve and Dune right now.
I also loved the books and I think this might be the difference. It’s only very loosely based on the books. Those who seem to enjoy the show often haven’t read the books at all, or don’t have much of a connection with them.
I just wish Hollywood would stop butchering such amazing IP. They should create new IP if they have such disdain for the original content.
I read the books (the first one anyway) and it doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the series significantly, IMO. I recognize that they’re very different mediums and written in very different contexts, so it’s fine for them both to be their own things.
An analogous case that I think is probably quite similar to this was “I, Robot.” The short story collection was classic and I enjoyed much of them, and the Will Smith “adaptation” was extremely different. But The Will Smith movie’s story was still an exploration of the Asimovian three laws and so IMO was worthy of being included in the “anthology.” I thought it was a good movie.
Generally speaking, books make for poor movie scripts and vice versa. The best adaptations require a lot of changes. The only prominent counterexample that comes to mind is Lord of the Rings, and even that one garnered a lot of complaints about the bits that were cut or tweaked.
I don’t quite understand why they do this with books. Maybe it’s because they have to, since many names and pieces obviously refer to the book. Or maybe they do it to attract people who have read the books.
The only parts of the show I enjoyed was the segments about the Emperor(s), which was a completely new invention of the show. It felt like somehow the writing A-team had snuck off to make some kind of weird original scifi thing, while the B-team was writing the “main” Foundation centered plot.
Putting aside any love for the books, I found the Foundation sections to be bad on their own terms. I stopped watching when the gang did a Call Of Duty mission into a ghost ship.
I agree! I enjoy it in the same way I enjoy the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie. Is it the same story? No. Is it still good? Absolutely
Yeah. I’m not a fan of this “in name only” practice. And being a fan of the books, and the greater Asimov universe, I did struggle at first.
Once I accepted how completely they were going to abandon the original, I did manage to enjoy what they did produce. It wasn’t weaker so much as just a completely different beast.
Going into S2 with this expectation, if the quality is as high as in S1, it should be well worth a watch.
(I can’t say the same of Wheel of Time. The TV series is just weaker, it’s a mess, a bigger mess than the first book which definitely had its issues. Damn shame, I really was hoping for an attempt to stay closer to the source without Rafe ‘updating it’ for what he thinks Jordan would have written today)
I really tried, but I definitely gave up on S01 when I burst into laughter during the scene where the people find the commander of the crashed ship crawling away. Good grief.
So much of that show is like written by a 6yo. Or a very primitive AI.
Oh and relation to Foundation? Zero. I believe the first few books are difficult to adapt, but not even try?
