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.
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.
Big-budget shows must succeed with a popular audience.
One of the nice things about the rapid improvements in special effects technology and AI is that I’m hoping smaller indy studios will start making more shows that are aimed at those niches. If you haven’t spent a lot to make the show you can afford to appeal to a much smaller audience.
Sure. But any TV show is big-budget compared to what it takes to produce a book. Books will always have more ability to cater to a weird little niche. Another reason to read more.
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.
it’s robots, foundation and empire all joined up, which Asimov did later when he revived and combined the series after a near 25 year break.
Eto Demerzel was revealed to be Daneel Olivaw (who was partner to Baley for some time), and effectively had become the main character of the entire combined franchise. so showing Demerzel as being an android in episode 2 was a hell of a jump, but of course with the whole of the foundation/empire and robots series to pull from and compress into one series it was a sensible reveal to make, considering her position as effectively a mother figure to the clones it is a good way to explain her longevity, and hint that she may be something of a mastermind ruling the empire vicariously to push it in a certain direction. the whole idea of the clones and genetic dynasty is new however, demerzel was originally only adviser to Cleon the first, manipulating the empire in support of Seldon.
spoiler
Kind of a spoiler if you haven’t read all of it, but Daneel originally developed psychohistory to influence humanity over time, the zeroth law of robotics came of this and effectively allowed robots to break the other laws (such as killing people) if it was for the greater good of humanity as a whole.
Thats where the true intrigue of the whole series comes from in my opinion and it looks like they have skipped that, or are changing it, we need to see or hear about Chetter Hummin in order to know if they are doing that story or not.
I’ve never heard of it before but I am gonna pick up the first book next week now.
Just keep in mind it is a pretty old book, and was originally a collection of short stories so it jumps around a bit.