It's an odd choice. The books aren't very well-written and have aged badly, the characterisation is poor, the central SF idea turned out to be so BS that the author abandons it halfway through the series (chaos theory pretty much put paid to psychohistory as even a vaguely plausible concept, as Asimov realised between Books 3 and 4), there are no female characters of note in the first three books, and almost no female characters of note who are not treated as sex objects in the latter four, and the story is so fragmented and broken up across different time periods you could never forge a coherent story out of it. Plus Asimov never finished it (the Galaxia storyline got so weird that he gave up and wrote prequels instead).
So I suspect this is going to borrow the Foundation name and a few concepts and character names but otherwise be a completely new storyline.
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That's a very odd take on a long acknowledged classic of SF.
Well, they're certainly old and influential, which may indicate they are "classics" by some metrics, but I don't feel that's enough. The LENSMAN series is also old and influential, but, like FOUNDATION, it's also badly written with poor characters (and a questionable line in eugenics). Just because something is old does not mean it's good.
For my metric a true "classic" has to stand up as a good read with interesting insights and good characters decades later. From the same time period or just after, THE DYING EARTH, DUNE, A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, THE STARS MY DESTINATION, CHILDHOOD'S END etc all still stand up across the board quite well today. FOUNDATION does not, in my opinion.
My thoughts on the problems with adaptating the series.
They are significant and I'm not sure how an adaptation will overcome them. Aside from levels of sexism that are unacceptable today, there other big issues are structural problems (unless this is going to be an SF version of FARGO, you can't refresh the entire cast every 3 episodes), technological issues (no AIs or robots 22,000 years in the future?), it doesn't have an ending and there's that massive cross-over with the ROBOTS and EMPIRE series later on which will come out of left-field massively since those stories aren't being adapted as well.
Another issue is that a lot of the ideas that FOUNDATION originated, including the modern idea of hyperspace, planets with cities covering the entire surface, galactic empires, space battles etc are now very standard tropes (STAR WARS borrowed a huge chunk of its worldbuilding from FOUNDATION, in particular) that may risk end up looking a little stale.
The sexism problem is easily overcome. Just replace some of the male characters in the original series with female ones.
(I especially think that Jord Parma, that missionary, should be a beautiful woman. Then when Hober Mallow turns her in to the Korellian authorities it will seem all the more shocking.)
But I agree that the Foundation saga - much as I love it - wouldn't translate well to TV.
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.
Borderline deranged pacing, with tons of stuff happening in 10 minutes and then nothing for 2 episodes and Jared Harris is so barely in this the "starring" thing is a bit of false advertising. And after 4 more episodes we've only had one which touched base with the episode 2 cliffhanger.
So far the MVP is Lee Pace and his epic smug-turning-into-confusion expression range.
It's entertaining, but weird.
In the books, there seem to be three phases:
1) In the earliest stories, clever protagonists arise to come up with the solutions to the Seldon crises that Seldon's recordings later say were basically pre-ordained.
2) At the beginning of the second book, the Foundation has no inspired leadership and the Empire is going against the Foundation with its cleverest general. The Foundation seems doomed until the general is betrayed by agents of the Emperor. The point is made that Seldon's plan is truly pre-ordained even without clever leadership.
3) And, of course, midway through the 2nd book, Seldon's plan completely falls apart in a way that I won't spoil here. From this point on, the flow of time gradually slows down, to the point that the last two books have the same protagonists (whereas in the previous books, nobody lasts all the way through even one book).
The TV show seriously alters the plot of the books in order to keep certain actors around longer, and Seldon's plan seems to depend way too much on individual actions.
I haven't seen the show yet but I've heard it described as "we wanted to make Dune but couldn't get the rights so we made this and attached a big name to it".
Is this a fair assessment?
I don't think so. Apple were never going to get the DUNE rights and FOUNDATION is its own popular series (though nowhere near the level of DUNE), and the FOUNDATION rights have been doing the rounds for about twenty years. Goyer has been trying to make it for ten years - at one point possibly as a movie series with Roland Emmerich directing (screams) - by himself.
Apparently an issue with the show is that Goyer pitched a somewhat book-faithful version which he tried to sell as "BLACK MIRROR in the future, in a shared universe" (BLACK MIRROR is at least partially in a shared universe, but with fairly vague connections), with each story adapted by itself sequentially, building up to the more serialised story of FOUNDATION'S EDGE/FOUNDATION & EARTH, with the prequels as possible spin-offs. However, none of the interested parties (reportedly Amazon were fairly interested, Netflix a bit more vaguely) thought that was a good idea and wanted a much more tightly serialised saga, which is a bit difficult when the books consist of self-contained narratives separated by 50-80 years. So they had to change the books quite a bit to get them to make sense.