I see what you mean. With Foundation, also in Apple TV+, I felt that the adaptation to television didn’t work — at least for my taste. I think that it was just a tricky book to adapt to another medium. I think Neuromancer has the potential to fail in a similar way (sadly!). But we’ll have to see how it goes!… :)
I think Apple just wanted their own Game of Thrones flagship, and on paper, Foundation seems like it should be that (epic scale, big ideas). But honestly, it needs a more subdued treatment: mostly talking heads in rooms, and an anthology that jumps forward decades with each episode, rotating characters as necessary.
Blockbuster narratives need heroes, which works directly at cross-purposes to the long-term systemic thinking that defines the books. There was probably never a scenario where the high price of buying the rights could match up with the size of audience for a more faithful adaptation. (And rightly or wrongly, non-book-readers seem broadly positive on the series.)
I just watched the Foundation adaptation and thought it was a pretty darned good TV show. It had a reasonable compelling plotline, compelling world building, and interesting takes on how technology could lead to strange social dynamics.
Yes, I'm sure it wasn't the same as the books (though I haven't read any of those in my adult life), but taken on its own it was a good show.
The Foundation series is a fascinating thought experiment stretched over an extremely barebones story with some very 1-dimensional characters.
The recent TV adaptation is pretty interesting, though. It's more of a loose adaptation and I think they've done a good job with adding more dimension to some of the characters.
Foundations series as a whole was relatively lite. Characters aren't that sophisticated as what you get in GoT, Dune, or Tolkiens. Screen adaptations are mostly to target a different kind of audience. People who loves the original books aren't the intended target. The mass who have heard of Asimov but didn't bother to read or just read the back of the book would be the main audience for this Foundations. It is currently way better than the finale of GoT.
Game of Thrones is an example of why serialized adaptations can be great.
Apparently (I haven't seen it for myself, but all the reviews suck), Foundation is simply not such an example. This doesn't mean serialized adaptations don't work. Similarly, I can find lots of examples of movie adaptations that suck; this doesn't mean movie adaptations can't work.
100% agree. Most of the time the adaptation is not an improvement.
Maybe a better/clearer point is this: I think Foundation is actually more suited for this kind of treatment because of it's 'flaws'. Aka, the idea is great and the potential is there to make it into something successful.
Of course, we'll have to wait to see if Apple/the production company can pull it off.
On a side note: I wish someone would buy the rights and reboot Babylon 5. I'm going through it with my GF for the 4th or 5th time since it aired. Still one of the best SciFi shows ever storywise and I have a soft spot for those Amiga VideoToaster graphics. Plus Vorlons.
Oh yes. The Foundation series would stand fine on its own, but it's pretty much the exact opposite of everything the book trilogy was, making the experience extremely jarring to me (I've read the books somewhat recently, so they were fresh in my mind when I started watching).
Imo, Foundation has so far been well done and produced and I enjoyed it. Their version of the books just isn't that representative of the source material it was based of off
So far, I prefer Foundation the series over the original Asimov book.
The book has an interesting philosophical idea (psychohistory), but just doesn't work as a story. It feels too much like a disjointed sequence of deus ex machinas. (To be fair, I've read some other stuff from Asimov's Foundation series that did work as a story.)
The TV series tells a pretty compelling story and mostly does so quite well. Of course, by far the best aspect (the genetic dynasty) isn't even part of the book at all. So yeah, it's not a faithful adaptation, but it is a better story. The only thing I'm doubtful of is whether they can keep it up. Spanning millenia in this format feels sort of impossible (except perhaps as an anthology series). How often is somebody just going to cryo-sleep for centuries and ending up in just the right place without it getting the same feeling of contrived deus ex machina as in the original book?
Not the PP, however it seems Foundation is one of those series both the audience and the actors themselves must sort of adapt to. I didn't read the Asimov original books (well I started like 40 years ago but gave up after finding them boring in contrast to short and non SF stories by him) so I didn't have any expectations, and was mostly satisfied with the series that appears getting better and better with time. Definitely not a masterpiece, but quite good.
Foundation is an interesting case because while the parts they adapted from the books are atrocious, the original story line about the three emperors is pretty good. It feels like the writers simply wanted to do their own show but were constrained by the producers.
Foundation was near-unadaptable as-is, given that it spans eras and wants the user to emotionally attach to the structure, rather than the individuals. For TV shows, audiences generally attach to characters (and the actors and actresses that play them), and the kind of story that allows a single cast to span eras would need to engage with some degree of time travel, cycles of life and/or abuse, or immortality, none of which fit in with Foundation.
That said, Neuromancer is a book that's more "cool" than good; Gibson is very good at painting pictures with words, but story itself is something of a convoluted mess. Hopefully an adaptation can give the writers a chance to smooth out the elements that don't work.
The problem with foundation wasn’t what you state. The problem is that they changed the story so much from the books that it doesn’t resemble them and they got the central theme exactly backwards.
Foundation is the most confusing show for me. Somehow it's telling a story which is completely unrelated to the books, while also faithfully recreating certain key moments from the books pretty much exactly as I imagined them; it manages to completely ignore all of the themes and indeed the core thesis of the books, but somehow still feels respectful in how it presents the universe; I feel bad that some of my favorite parts of the original story are all but certainly written out, but I love that I have no idea where this is going.
It feels a lot like the 1997 Starship Troopers movie where it was initially supposed to be an original work, but the studio said "hmm that's kinda like this classic story, can you turn this into an adaptation?" and the writer said yes but their fingers were crossed.
I'm enjoying the hell out of the Foundation series, and the first couple episodes of Shogun have been great. I'll probably love Neuromancer as well. The trick to enjoying film/TV adaptations of books is to never read the books beforehand.
They're scraping the barrel now for literature to adapt. The studios desperately want another Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. I feel like Foundation and even Dune are just not fit for being adapted. Foundation is so easy to read that people should really just read it.
It's such a shame that His Dark Materials failed as that would make an excellent adaptation and the source material is far superior to Harry Potter.
Unpopular opinion: Foundation, as written, would probably be very niche TV. A straightforward adaptation would be terrible, albeit interesting if seasons were launched in the order of the books the way Asimov fused his Robots, Empire, and Foundation series. Even then, you can get away with a lot less detail in a book than you can with a TV series - you need to flesh out cultures and characters that, in a book, you can leave shallow.
I’d say this is Foundation, but for TV. It’s a different beast and I’m curious how much it will deviate from the books big picture (which, in total, span a couple dozen millennia.
I tried reading Foundation when I was younger and could not get into it. I think they've done a pretty good job with the Apple Series.
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