The first three books are fantastic ideas but, honestly, the format of small vignettes spanning centuries with no recurring characters works in a novel but is terrible to adapt to the screen.
When I first heard of this adaptation, my reaction was "How are they going to make an engaging story for a TV audience out of them?"
While not perfect, after the first series I am impressed with what they have done.
The inclusion of following the emperors was a good idea that fleshes out the story, universe and gives a good counterpoint to the foundation.
A page perfect adaptation of the books would be visually boring to most people.
Avid fans of the novels must also realise that the show was made to draw in people who have never read the books. If they were to only attract people who have read the books, the show would be a failure as they would never have been able to justify the budget.
They did not make the show for you, me or other Asimov fans. They made it for a general audience who will only know the adaptation. A hologram that arrives at the end of each storyline with a deus ex machina to solve all the problems will not be engaging to the genera public.
Walking Dead has done it for years.
And the show, to me, was terrible. Slow, formulaic and boring once the first season ended. So it is not something I would use as an example.
I thought the Foundation books were conceited and trite - I know that’s not going to make me popular here. The first ATV season was pretty damn good, building on the main themes that made the books so seminal, but adding a human dimension which helps to make the story feel as epic as people make it out to be.
My main problem with them is how the politics just drag on and on and how long winded some of the descriptions are.
I never made it through them reading them, it wasn't until I went audiobook and just accepted that my brain would fall asleep for stretches of it that I made it through.
There's some genius in there but it really takes some wading through the mud to get there.
The TV series is showing some promise that they will be able to wrangle this sprawling spaghetti into some sort of form that's fit for TV. I will be very impressed if they pull it off.
Me too bud, I was looking forward to Jordan's masterpiece getting an adaptation to the small screen but I couldn't even make it through one episode. It's like the showrunner took The Witcher's terrible adaptation as a personal challenge to fuck over the source material in the most fuck you way possible and went at it with both boots.
It is quite different, and I put off watching it out of fear of this until a few days ago, thinking I was going to hate it as I loved the books.
I remember thinking when they first announced making this, how the fuck are they going to make psychohistory and a relentlesly changing timespan into a TV show? Personally I thought what they've made is excellent scifi TV, I mostly binged it. Maybe they tried staying true to source material at first and realised it just doesn't make for a compelling show?
People give the Game of Thrones guys crap for the final few seasons, but you have to remember, they ran out of material to adapt, they were basically working off Martin's Post-It-Notes at that point.
While they actually HAD material to adapt, they were OK. Trying to generate new content off a bare bones outline? Maybe not so much.
That's a fair point, that I'd not considered. I'm trying not to pre-judge 3BP, but also trying not to get too excited for it... hype is a killer when it falls flat