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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I think this is a very outdated view of the way series and streaming platform have evolved. There’s no “slot” to fill. There’s no need for universal appeal.

“The Crown” is a good example. This would never have been made into a show before streaming.

The Foundation could have been a intellectually stimulating sci-fi show that appealed a lot to a smaller audience and it still would have been successful.

> There’s no “slot” to fill. There’s no need for universal appeal.

That’s true, but, depending on your budget, you’ll need a large audience to justify the investment.

As opposed to the traditional networks the time you have to build that "large" audience is insanely higher. Who knows how long streaming services will be around for.

People are still watching Friends for instance.

I think Prelude to Foundation would work on TV, and I'm slightly surprised they didn't attempt that first, cos presumably you either do it now or never. But that probably would have been a weird thing for fans of the original book.

You're right though, Foundation has an odd structure that doesn't at all match modern prestige TV templates, you'd do better with a sort of anthology series of some sort.

I completely agree. The robot novels would be much easier stories to adapt with little deviation from the novels. It's been decades since I've read the whole canon of Asimov robot and Foundation novels, but I recall the Foundation novels being very dry and academic - I loved them, but they're just not high adventure action stories that translate well to the screen.

You can start with the robots, and then move to the Foundation story with the robots from the beginning, because that's how Asimov revised his own Foundation story.

Or they could reveal the connection with the robots at a later stage, the way Asimov did, while pretending the series are not that much connected.

That belief is not incompatible with a blockbuster version of it being shit.

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