When the first trailers for Foundation came out I decided to re-read the books, I liked them as a kid. So I did. I re-read all of Foundation and Robots of the Dawn.

AppleTV+'s take on Foundation is the best thing that could possibly happen to the books.

Asimov was a bad writer, and the product of his era. His ideas about Seldon crises were rather good, but everything around was just bad. People don't have dialogs, they proselytise and have monologues at each other. Women are non-existent, or serve as furniture (except maybe two characters in both series combined). There's a huge disconnect between what technology is imagined to do (FTL, detailed holographic maps of the Galaxy) and how it's used (calculations done with pen-and-paper, newspapers and communications printed out even on FTL ships). And so on.

Foundation series took the premise and ran away with it. And good for them.

The Foundation books are just people with zero personality talking about their plans in an office or a starship bridge. Usually congratulating themselves on how well their plans went.

Then we jump in time, the previous people are mostly dead and a new group of people talk in a room.

It's not exactly riveting stuff for TV.

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