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by dbspin 700 days ago
I think your description of television much better fits the mould of 90's network TV (24 weekly episodes per year) than prestige era limited series or narrative arc TV. Foundation could absolutely be done as an anthology show in the vein of American Horror story - where each season covered an era of an unfolding narrative, with characters like Hari Seldon and R.Daniel recurring as audience favourites.

Either way though, there are issues with the adaptation that are quite distinct from eschewing the episodic arc of the original trilogy. It's full of spiritual woo for one, which is entirely antithetical to Azimov's vision. It's also more than fond of sadistic violence. Azimov's whole method as a writer was to have smart characters solve difficult problems intellectually. 'Violence is the last resort of the incompetent' after all.
1 comments
voltaireodactyl 700 days ago
I hear where you’re coming from, but you will note that AHS, while being an anthology, pulls continuously from the same group of audience favorite actors — which goes back to the “people putting on a show” variant I described above. The audience has a relationship with those actors. Very meta, as befits a Ryan Murphy shindig.

That recurrence that wouldn’t be possible for a Foundation series without suggesting characters themselves are repeating through time, which would seem to lean even harder into woo, which I’m sensing is not your bag.

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dbspin 699 days ago
Agreed - but as I said with Foundations specifically, that you could change the characters each series and keep your anchor characters (i.e.: those that live on literally by being robots, or through projection). It's also pretty amenable to cutting back and forth in time. In other words multiple parallel timelines, which a number of shows have pulled off. There are enormous underserved audiences for clever complex formally innovative TV, and a whole bunch of money going into fluff that (at least in Apple's case, seems like it isn't drawing an audience now - let alone in future rereleases, as the prestige shows of the 90s did).
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