Projects are massively expensive, including a lot spent on "looking expensive", but the writing cannot be as expertly crafted because the high expense means upper management craves purpose and control and meddles with things, and the giant "target" audience means you can't do anything interesting.
Brother Dawn: How often do we make this choice?
Demerzel: You always make this choice.
For example, each short story almost completely changes the cast (of course, with some descendants of characters appearing occasionally), as befits a saga that spans centuries. No producer was willing to run with that (as they didn't believe the audience smart enough to follow it would be big enough for the show to make a profit), so they introduced cryonics, clones, sorta-AIs (including robots out of their original context) to have some sort of continuing cast.
Also, the books have a quaint 1940s (NOT 1950s as people usually say it) atmosphere, with excitement about "atomic" energy (changed to "nuclear" in the 1950s publication), distant descendents of the slide rule, and generally weird-sounding math and science, that the show totally drops in favor of a "contemporary" feel.
And btw, the space elevator scene is lifted from Brin's Foundation's Triumph where it is described as a "future" event, part of Trantor's fall, predicted by Seldon's early team and trickled down to the general population.
The next day’s hearings were entirely different. Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick were alone with the Commission. They were seated at a table together, with scarcely a separation between the five judges and the two accused. They were even offered cigars from a box of iridescent plastic which had the appearance of water, endlessly flowing. The eyes were fooled into seeing the motion although the fingers reported it to be hard and dry.
In a recent re-reading of the series, I started having difficult with it in Second Foundation... and forced myself to finish Foundation's Edge. The amount of psionic ability and the... for lack of a better word "preaching" with the monologues was very much a science fiction of a different time.
Foundation (the TV series) had to do updates for modern audiences and media. I'm not sure if trying to remain perfectly faithful to the books would represent them well.
Foundation is a soft sci-fi about interactions between individuals and history and society. Trying to maintain the incidental harder parts of the written works that modern audiences expect to be somewhat consistent of far future technology with the 1950s lens on them would be quaint and a bit off-putting to people expecting future tech.
He threw his cigar away and looked up at the outstretched Galaxy. “Back to oil and coal, are they?” he murmured—and what the rest of his thoughts were he kept to himself.
What at joy it'd be to fully experience life, not just a sanitized productized version, and have the safety net of perfect medicine to cure what ails ya.
I wish directors were brave enough to kill off characters if it serves the plot. I get that there's IRL reasons that make it difficult (like contracts, scheduling, etc) but each new season accumulates more subplots to the point it's like a 30 minute episode is really a compilation of 3x 10-minute shows.
This bugs me in multiple-protagonist books too. Just feels like an excuse to pad the page count with introductions and cliff hangers every POV switch.
In terms of hardness, it probably on par with Expanse, so mostly technobabble with the magical tech only used when it's convenient for the plot. The abuse of "psychohistory" is particularly egregious. There's so many scenes where it's visualized a hologram of scribbles and they zoom in on more squiggles while divining the future.
But again it's pretty, so if you're okay with drama in space, it's maybe a 8/10.
My friends who like sci-fi enjoyed it.
It is regardless very striking and high budget.
Apple's put out a staggering amount of content the last few years, I wasn't even aware this one debuted!