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Apple's TV show based on Asimov's FOUNDATION, starring Jared Harris


Werthead
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Nice.

I'm sceptical about the project still - the Foundation books have aged very poorly - but casting Jared Harris as Hari Seldon is a massive statement of intent. Lee Pace as the Emperor is also not a bad catch. The fact the Emperor seems to be a new character (the emperor in Seldon's time in the books was Cleon II) also hints that the TV show will be very loosely based on the books rather than a close adaptation.

 

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I remember reading the books with some fondness, but sure, Asimov wasn't a great wordsmith and his characters were pretty thin. That said, I think any attempt that captures the size and scope of the Galactic Empire and Trantor could be interesting. And if they get to the Mule... that could be quite cool.

Goyer bothers me, though. Harris and Pace, great, fine actors both, but Goyer is a fairly mediocre producer and writer. That's concerning.

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Man, I had forgotten about 'Flashforward' until I just looked at Goyer's IMDB. That show was one where I look back and wonder why exactly I watched it. I guess that's the difference between the world with streaming and the world without. 

 

Instead of useful info, my brain will always remember Fiennes in his dodgy American accent saying 'I was drinking my flashfoward' like 50 times in that show. 

 

Harris is the best but I'd like him to use his Belter accent for everything moving forward. 

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  • 1 year later...

Per reports, it looks like Foundation will be premiering some time in September. 

Teaser from last year:

 

And someone did a rundown of additional glimpses seen during the Apple conference:

 

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  • 2 months later...

Interview with Lee Pace. 

I love this take on Cleon, and making him seem like continually cloning himself is a factor in thinking longer term than other rulers could, so would avoid the problems that psychohistory predicts. Instead he makes psychohistory more predictable because his thinking can be more effectively modelled. Cleon is like the anti-Mule, a stabilizing force to the equations instead of a disruptive one.

 

 

Edited by SpaceChampion
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5 hours ago, SpaceChampion said:

Interview with Lee Pace. 

I love this take on Cleon, and making him seem like continually cloning himself is a factor in thinking longer term than other rulers could, so would avoid the problems that psychohistory predicts. Instead he makes psychohistory more predictable because his thinking can be more effectively modelled. Cleon is like the anti-Mule, a stabilizing force to the equations instead of a disruptive one.

 

 

I agree- while its totally not something explored in the books, it does work better in a lot of ways. 

To the other comments about worrying about it being off-script- I think they really have to in order to make a good story for TV.  I just finished the series and, I hate to say it, but Forward to Foundation was the weakest of the series and kinda ruined the mythos around Hari Seldon, so I wouldnt mind if they largely tossed it out of the script.  That, and Azimov wrote women as if he had read about them in a history book and decided to try and recreate how they would act accordingly. 

It was fun reading the author trying to deal with technological advances IRL that created anachronism after anachronism.  The poor guy's visionary technologies had a shelf-life of like 20 years before they were obsolete vs the 30k years envisioned in the series.

Overall, I love that they are doing this, Psychohistory makes for such a rich sci-fi canvas to paint in. 

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Two episodes in (only three were released today).

Easily one of the most visually impressive TV shows ever made. Outrageous production values and a very high-tier cast. Lee Pace and Jared Harris are, of course, magnificent, but a great appearance by Alexander Siddig as well. It made me wonder if that was a nod to the DS9 episode Statistical Probabilities, which was highly influenced by psychohistory.

The visual design is also exceptional: it looks like they took the definitive Asimov covers - the Elson and Foss covers of the 1970s - and melded them with a lived-in look to create something that's quite impressive. In the first episode alone, there are a dozen amazing SF images.

It's truer to the books than expected in some areas (including being fairly slow and talky), but it adds a lot of new material to fill in the immense, yawning gaps of the original narrative. Splitting Emperor Cleon XII into three clones is an interesting idea, and the idea of a 9/11-style mega-terror-attack as a symbol of the beginning of the Empire's fall works quite well. Also having the knowledge of robots being more widespread and having the Spacer culture still existing (rather than having faded out millennia earlier) are intriguing changes.

The ending of episode 2 was really weird though. Interesting to see how they resolve that.

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https://www.vulture.com/article/foundation-review-apple-tv-plus.html

Quote

... As a thing you put on in front of your eyes and watch drift by, brilliantly colored and painstakingly rendered? You really can’t beat it. Posters and book covers of fantasy lands have long been more romantic and artful than what practical effects or CGI could really live up to. Give me a cheap, pulpy sci-fi book cover with wild green mountains and three purple moons hanging low in the sky over the fairly stark stuff that tends to show up in genre screen productions any day. Not Foundation, though. Every frame lives up to the outrageous vision of mid-century grand-scale science-fiction otherworldliness. There’s a mid-season plot twist that hinges on a hunting scene in a lush extraterrestrial jungle, and even if Foundation never managed to make any of its characters especially convincing, I’d have been more than happy to just hang out in that wild green place with its strange red lizard birds for hours on end. . . .

 

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I'm not very impressed so far- while the show has some interesting ideas (like the three-in-one emperors), and it's already one of the most beautiful and visually impressive ever made, it never fully gets going, and it just has some choices that strike as awful (the 9/11 style attack, which not only is unnecessary, but would logically only make them want to execute Hari even sooner to show strength,  revealing Demerzel's nature so soon) or just weird (like the end).

While it's not bad, I can't help the feeling this show would work better as an anthology with setting and some characters returning- like Fargo, for example.

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The first two episodes have me feeling very mixed. I can appreciate the potential of using the books as a skeletal structure for a larger, more ambitious narrative. Unfortunately I don't think the writers of this show are suited to the task.

One thing Asimov was not very adept at was character development. That didn't matter for the vignettes in The Foundation trilogy because the draw of the series was the plot, not the characters.

The show spends much more time trying to develop its characters, but it seems the writers share Asimov's inadequacy on this front. The romance subplot and other soap opera elements (eg the pregnancy) had me rolling my eyes. And all the characters are still very flat.

There was enough of a vestige of the original story that I will give the show a couple more episodes, but I feel like Goyer is going to live up to his reputation as a mediocre screenwriter when he doesn't have a Nolan to babysit him (granted, Dark City was great, but that aside he hasn't done well for himself).

Edited by IFR
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20 hours ago, Werthead said:

Two episodes in (only three were released today).

Easily one of the most visually impressive TV shows ever made. Outrageous production values and a very high-tier cast. Lee Pace and Jared Harris are, of course, magnificent, but a great appearance by Alexander Siddig as well. It made me wonder if that was a nod to the DS9 episode Statistical Probabilities, which was highly influenced by psychohistory.

The visual design is also exceptional: it looks like they took the definitive Asimov covers - the Elson and Foss covers of the 1970s - and melded them with a lived-in look to create something that's quite impressive. In the first episode alone, there are a dozen amazing SF images.

It's truer to the books than expected in some areas (including being fairly slow and talky), but it adds a lot of new material to fill in the immense, yawning gaps of the original narrative. Splitting Emperor Cleon XII into three clones is an interesting idea, and the idea of a 9/11-style mega-terror-attack as a symbol of the beginning of the Empire's fall works quite well. Also having the knowledge of robots being more widespread and having the Spacer culture still existing (rather than having faded out millennia earlier) are intriguing changes.

The ending of episode 2 was really weird though. Interesting to see how they resolve that.

Only two episodes were released in the US.  Did you get three in the UK?

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I’m also very confused by the end of the second episode.  Why did Raych attack and possibly kill Seldon?  Why did he launch Gaal out of the ship in deep space?  I don’t remember any of that from the book.  I remember Seldon’s trial then they jumped straight to Terminus.

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1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I’m also very confused by the end of the second episode.  Why did Raych attack and possibly kill Seldon?  Why did he launch Gaal out of the ship in deep space?  I don’t remember any of that from the book.  I remember Seldon’s trial then they jumped straight to Terminus.

I think this is less of a "based on" and more of an "inspired by" approach to an adaptation. Apparently the first season will only cover the first two stories of Foundation. So this show will be 90% original material and 10% Asimov material with liberal doses of artistic liberties.

Hence the silliness with the full blown evil emperor, Raych being made into a tedious, brooding punk, and the obnoxious romance jammed into the show. Goyer stated that he wanted to emotionally connect with the audience, and this is how people who can't write do it. Also have to have the shock factor to keep the audience engaged.

I'm very pessimistic that this scenario is at all well thought out. I hope I'm wrong.

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Two episodes in and while this looks good and has some great actors in it, I'm feeling that my original scepticism was the right reaction. I'll give it one more episode but so far, it's as leaden and lifeless as I feared. Everyone's very intense, all the time: Seldon can't so much as pick up the laundry without speechifying. Also, it's not a particularly good idea to drop a recurring character for the whole of your second episode. And that scene with Raych and Seldon at the dinner table seemed like it was taken from a whole different series that just happened to feature the same two actors. Didn't relate to the two characters we've been shown till then.

Can anyone tell me in what way episode 2 furthered the plot?

I'm going to stop now because I'm literally making myself mad.

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Phew. That was a vast improvement, and the idea of splitting the episode in two was a wise one. I suspect they thought about devoting a full hour to how the heritage aspect of the Emperor and realised they didn't have enough story, so made it half an hour devoted to Terrance Mann being distinguished and then making the rest a prologue to the meat of the original Foundation novel (where the Ancreons served as antagonists for much of the first book).

Not touching base with why Raych attacked Seldon and what happened to Gaal is odd, but also good in that it showed us how the Foundation developed in the decades leading up to the First Crisis.

That said, it was slow and the plot and especially dialogue are not really justifying the slow pace. The visuals remain absolutely amazing though.

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Hate to disagree, but I didn't see any significant improvement here. There wasn't enough story for an hour even with two parts. Heck, there wasn't enough story for half an hour. It's wallpaper at this point: you can safely be checking Twitter and not miss anything.

The entire episode summary would take maybe six lines. But worse, we're three episodes in and I don't know what story it is Goyer wants to tell here. He's barely scraped Asimov's story and some things he's doing suggest he's going to tell a very different version of that. Well, fine. But could you get on with telling it?

ETA - I kept thinking, if I was a viewer with no background with the books who didn't know what Foundation was about, would I now, three hours in, have any idea what Foundation is about? Unfortunately I'm not sure I would have more than a vague notion.

Edited by mormont
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