The Problem With Apple TV's Foundation

Foundation. Image courtesy of Apple TV.

Apple’s move into the streaming game is underway. Whether it will be a success or not, remains to be seen. They have one accidental hit on their hands (which is not actually that good), and then they dumped a huge amount of money into adapting Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation novels into an epic space opera. It’s not the hit they were hoping for and the show has received pretty terrible reviews, although everyone is careful to qualify their criticism by mentioning that it looks beautiful. Indeed it does.

The visuals almost cannot be faulted, and they are 100% successful at helping to build this large and complex galaxy-spanning world. As the show hops from place to place within a 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire, it has a textured reality and depth that makes it feel real and lived-in. A lot of thought was put into the visual look of Foundation, and it does so much of the heavy lifting in the early going. It conveys the complexity of the show’s world in elegant and often stunning ways. The action, whether staged in space or on the city-planet of Trantor, is so clean and shot in ways that establish the massive sense of scale necessary to make you feel the bigness of this world, much the same ways as Dune did. I loved looking at this thing.

In the first few episodes I didn’t understand why people were so negative on the show. Yes, it moves slowly, but it was carefully building out a very large and complicated world, one ruled by an imperial dynasty of genetic clones, where math can predict the future and where planets and cultures have evolved their own distinct identities. That takes time to do well.

Yes, it moves away from the source material but that is also fine - I don’t think anybody expects a totally faithful adaptation of a series written in the 1940s. It kept the main ideas intact - that math whizz Hari Seldon develops a probabilistic model capable of predicting the coming fall of the Empire, and wants to set up a colony to preserve knowledge and reduce the coming Dark Ages. The way the emperors rotate through the stages of life is borderline genius, and Lee Pace as Emperor Day is magnetic. Superb performance.

If they had just kept building this gorgeously detailed world, and played up some of those high-concept sci-fi ideas, this show could have been great. But it is let down by the basic mechanics of narrative structure, plot and story-telling in a way that is inexcusable. And that is why, as I got further and further into the first season, I got more and more upset. It’s infuriating what they have done here, because the potential is there. The visuals are there. The world-building is there. So much top-quality hard work had gone into it. But the people who envisioned the story arc, who wrote the actual scripts, they completely screwed it up. And so, all of that talent and that potential just goes to waste. It’s a shame.

The thing is, if you are an executive at Apple you should have seen this coming! It was the inevitable result of making David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman the show-runners. These are the brain trust, after all, that most recently brought us the unwatchable trash-can of Terminator: Dark Fate. They have a superhuman ability to take established properties, misunderstand everything about those properties that made them great, and then try to spice them up in ways that end up destroying everything we love out about the original to begin with.

We must pause here for a moment to look at David S. Goyer’s career. In the 1990s and early 2000s he had some really good genuinely creative and subversive credits, including Blade and Dark City. Then he starts getting sucked into Christopher Nolan’s orbit, and although his dark and unconventional ideas might be good, they start being refracted through Nolan Vision, where everything has to be ten times more complicated than it should be, otherwise how will people know it’s a masterpiece?

When Nolan gives notes he doesn’t ask “Is this good story-telling?” He says: “There aren’t enough arbitrary time jumps in this draft, David!” After hooking up with Nolan on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Goyer starts coming out with some real bombs: Ghost Rider, Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and culminating in Terminator: Dark Fate which, and I cannot stress this enough, is an abomination.

These films are all pretty bad, but the main reason for their badness is they don’t understand the source material. What kind of person writes a movie about Batman and Superman fighting each other, and thinks that the climax should be a scene where they realize that both their moms are named Martha? You just can’t trust a person who would come to that conclusion. You certainly can’t trust that person to adapt yet ANOTHER existing property, one that’s many times more complex and difficult like Asimov’s Foundation. But that’s what Apple did, because they have Apple money so what do they care?

Now let’s get into some example. It’s not that I mind Apple’s version making changes from the books, but they should be thoughtful changes. But they have changed Hari completely, for one. I think it would have been fine if his holograph just kept popping up every once in a while to steer the story along or fill us in on some exposition. But they’ve turned him into something bordering on a villain.

Well, one version of him anyway. You see, there are at least two versions of Hari Seldon in this show, because obviously, when we have Nolan Vision, one would simply not have been enough. And the only possible reason to do that is because they want to make it edgier, and inject more drama. They don’t trust audiences to be awed by a painstakingly detailed space world. So they turn to pointless, badly written melodrama. Inexcusable.

But the real let-down is the arc on Terminus, dealing with the founding of the Foundation colony. This could have been such a compelling story about how a society is built from the ground-up amidst the ruins of a collapsing empire. It could have stayed basically true to Asimov’s ideas, and shown how people rise to meet challenges under conditions of great uncertainty.

Instead, they introduce some third-tier Star Trek The Next Generation antagonists who take us on an utterly pointless (from a structural point of view) detour to find an abandoned space ship and do a bunch of nonsense just so they can all end up back on Terminus together three episodes later after having wasted valuable time with nothing but bad acting and dialogue. Not only is it not enjoyable to watch, it doesn’t DO anything for the show. There are a million better, more elegant ways to have gotten that ship into the hands of the colonists, but it felt like they were stretching it out Laffy Taffy-style because they needed to fill time. Inexcusable.

That is basically where all the of Foundation’s story problems come from. The writing isn’t being shaped by what makes a good story or being driven by the exploration of novel, complex ideas. It’s being shaped by the demands of the narrative structure they hatched up, and that structure is fundamentally unsound. They don’t trust the audience to stick with the story as it jumps 50 or 100 years into the future every few episodes with all knew characters so they have invented convoluted plot lines and character arcs that allow us to follow the same core group of actors on this journey. That was a misguided decision from the drop, and it requires the writing to bend over backwards not in service of the best stories and the best character beats, but to satisfy the demands of the narrative structure they have locked themselves into.

Even worse is that all of these really bad story lines stand in sharp contrast to the Empire arc, spearheaded by Lee Pace’s excellent performance. That story is really good, and so well-acted. And then they jump back to these under-cooked dumplings running around on Terminus stuck in a Screenwriter 101 hamster wheel, and you just wonder why, why is this happening? I go to Church. I’m nice to the elderly. I donate to charities. I recycle. Why has the world done this to me? Why did someone put David S. Goyer in charge of developing yet another established property? And the ghost of Isaac Asimov stares back across the void, plaintive and full of scorn, and he laughs in my face.