On Foundation the TV Series
I just finished the last episode of the first season of Apple TV+’s lavish take on Isaac Asimov’s groundbreaking series of Foundation novels.
I immediately cancelled my Apple TV+ subscription as the final credits rolled.
Here’s a ramble on my reasons for giving up on the series.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the spectacle, the costumes, Lee Pace’s scowling, the exotic settings, the robots, the clone empire… it’s just that I’d seen it all before, and seen it done in many ways better and fresher, and it just isn’t the book series.
It would be more honest to call it ‘Foundation, the TV Show Inspired by Some Characters and Stuff in Isaac Asimov’s Novels but We Like Big Guns and Explosions Better than Big Ideas.’
At the very least, Foundation the TV Show (hereafter FTVS) inspired me to re-read Foundation the Book Series (hereafter FTBS), of which I had but a vague recollection from my teenage years long, long ago (but in this galaxy).
What dismayed me most on re-reading the books, was how little FTVS resembles FTBS, in form or idea. FTVS covers barely the first two stories collected in the first volume of FTBS, and even with a planned 80 more episodes, I struggle to see how FTVS can drag itself away from the pew-pew gun-battles, tragic romances and personal identity struggles of the characters back to the capital-I Ideas that drove FTBS.
Most of the book series, clumsy dialogue and wooden characterization aside, consisted of characters literally sitting around discussing ideas, about humanity, society, the limits of power, with very little action. If it wasn’t that it would take a couple of weeks to watch as a stage play, everything described in the stories would fit on a modest playhouse stage.
That was the challenge facing the show’s producers and writers, how to make pure ideas compelling in a visual medium, in an age that expects grand action and flash from its science fiction TV. If they had literally translated the books to the screen, it would have rivalled the worst PBS dramas in its sedative qualities.
So how to film it? What could FTVS have been if it came before all of the books, movies and TV shows it inspired? There is now an expectation that TV science fiction involves laser blasters, vast explosions, heros and romances, weird aliens — the very elements of pulp science fiction in the 1920’s and 1930’s that Asimov transcended in FTBS.
In FTBS, Salvor Hardin, first Mayor of the Foundation, solves the first Seldon crisis not through violence, but negotiation. That is lost in FTVS. As Asimov said himself, ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’ If that is so, then FTVS reflects little on the competence of its creators.
I can’t entirely blame the producers of FTVS for its use of well-worn tropes. It’s what we’ve been trained to expect. In a way, FTVS is eating its own children. Had FTVS by some technological miracle preceded Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, Battlestar Galactica, Bladerunner, the whole Marvel and DC film universes, it might have stood a chance of being accepted as a story about ideas. Since that didn’t happen in this galaxy, FTVS must take on the weight of all the science fiction we’ve been fed from screens over the past 50 years. Maybe the producers are just too afraid to chance that audiences will accept shows that inspire thought, given the hundreds of millions in production budgets and billions in ad revenue at stake.
And that perhaps is the latent decline and ultimate downfall of Apple TV+’s attempt to build a TV empire — if it can’t respect Asimov’s original vision, then it too is doomed.
