Apple TV's 30-Episode Sci-Fi Masterpiece Deserves Kudos For Daring To Change The Books

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Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is driven by a heavy sociological angle. Owing to this, the books are less about individual characters and more about the behavior of large masses. His stories span across centuries, where the protagonists constantly change every 50 to 100 pages. From a literary standpoint, they are brilliant. But for a TV show, they are a little too internalized.

On-screen storytelling is significantly different because it requires individual-driven mythos. Especially in the streaming era, viewers need rootable long-term characters to remain invested. This is why Apple TV’s Foundation completely ditches the books’ approach and embraces more of the “Chosen One” trope to drive its story.

The Apple TV sci-fi show also introduces radically different narrative devices that have nothing to do with the books. For instance, Asimov does an incredible job of capturing the Galactic Empire’s fall by walking through everything from bureaucratic rot to the negative impact of rotating generic emperors. To capture the same decline, the show resorts to a completely different device.

It shows how Imperial cloning allows the same figure to rule for hundreds of years, leading to the same ideological stagnation captured in the books. This creative liberty in the TV series is genius because it ensures it retains a permanent roster of characters while still capturing the source material’s essence.

After reading the books, some might still find it hard to accept Apple TV’s Foundation as a good adaptation. And that is okay! Still, it can be perceived more as an ambitious alternate take on the original story instead of a literal translation.

A Word-For-Word Adaptation Of Foundation Wouldn’t Have Survived

When it comes to accurately adapting their source material, there are far better shows than Foundation out there. However, Foundation would have likely failed if it had closely adapted Isaac Asimov’s books. The original book series consists of a series of novellas. Every few pages, the story takes a massive timeline leap, where old characters die while new ones take over.

For a reader, these shifting perspectives in the novel are easy to follow because they are connected through the Foundation‘s core concept of Psychohistory.

With on-screen adaptations, viewers not only invest themselves in ideas and themes but also in characters and the actors who play them. This is why even Apple TV’s Silo had to mark Rebecca Ferguson’s return in season 3 even though her character, Juliette, barely shows up in Hugh Howey’s second book.

Asimov’s books are also heavily driven by dialog, where conflicts are resolved through trade negotiations and long board meetings. A fantasy or sci-fi TV series cannot purely rely on discussions and descriptions to portray major galactic crises and has to visually externalize the friction, scale, and spectacle of these events.

Therefore, even though Foundation is not the best direct book adaptation, it is fair to conclude that an on-screen take on Asimov’s books could not have been better than the Apple TV sci-fi series.

Isaac Asimov’s novel series is brought to life in Foundation, a television adaptation of the epic sci-fi saga created for Apple TV+. The show follows a group of exiled humans that find themselves as the last chance to save the Galactic Empire, primarily from itself.