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December book club canceled. Short stories instead!
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Personally I kinda liked the first season. It's better if you forget the original Asimov story and just watch it as its own thing because it diverges from it quite a bit.
Season 2 Full Trailer - Youtube
Looking forward to see where they go after that ballsy season 1 ending. Lee Pace will continue to kill it no doubt.
Unfortunately I didn't enjoy the 1st season, just like other commenters here. A preliminary reason could be that the story is very different from the book, which is one of my most favourite sci-fi books ever. But even simply seeing this series as something different from the book, if found it too cheap: the characters are half-stereotypes, the events are what you'd expect, usual blood and sex to attract viewers...
Should go without saying, just my personal opinion and tastes. I'm happy that others enjoyed the series and I hope it'll made them curious to read the books.
I love the books. I've read the original trilogy three times, as well as heard the BBC radio dramatization (from the 1970s). My anticipation for this series was sky-high.
Halfway through Season One I stopped watching, baffled in an uninterested way about how they dropped everything that had the original Foundation spirit, I recognized the names of most characters and some planets, but everything in between was crammed with Goyer's self-important posturing, insistence on mystery boxes and artificial cliffhangers.
The books will live on, they are immortal. The series, not so much, it will age quickly and badly.
Thank God we also have Villeneuve and Dune right now.
Agree 200%!
Honestly, I'm just rewatching The Expanse (6th time) instead. 🤌🏼
That's a great idea, cheers!
I also loved the books and I think this might be the difference. It’s only very loosely based on the books. Those who seem to enjoy the show often haven’t read the books at all, or don’t have much of a connection with them.
I just wish Hollywood would stop butchering such amazing IP. They should create new IP if they have such disdain for the original content.
I read the books (the first one anyway) and it doesn't affect my enjoyment of the series significantly, IMO. I recognize that they're very different mediums and written in very different contexts, so it's fine for them both to be their own things.
An analogous case that I think is probably quite similar to this was "I, Robot." The short story collection was classic and I enjoyed much of them, and the Will Smith "adaptation" was extremely different. But The Will Smith movie's story was still an exploration of the Asimovian three laws and so IMO was worthy of being included in the "anthology." I thought it was a good movie.
Generally speaking, books make for poor movie scripts and vice versa. The best adaptations require a lot of changes. The only prominent counterexample that comes to mind is Lord of the Rings, and even that one garnered a lot of complaints about the bits that were cut or tweaked.
I don't quite understand why they do this with books. Maybe it's because they have to, since many names and pieces obviously refer to the book. Or maybe they do it to attract people who have read the books.
@pglpm @JasSmith I reckon it's three things:
It's not really free tho, since IP rights cost a ton of money. And honestly, adaptations that aren't true to the source don't tend to do well, at least not beyond the first product.
It used to be the case that studios could buy IP rights for peanuts and make a cheap knockoff, but that's not the case anymore.
@WhoRoger free was wrong phrasing. I meant that it was a way to sidestep the lack of familiarity that stops people from trying new media. People will give Spiderman xyzabc a shot rather than try out a completely unknown IP. In a congested streaming economy, that advantage is worth quite a bit.
Sure, but the costs of IP can significantly eat into the profits, and if the studio bungles the adaptation, then it's just wasted money.
Scifi is a particularly tricky genre to produce, there's almost no high-profile TV show that hasn't been botched, cancelled or otherwise messed with.
But scifi is still mostly for geeks and probably always will be, and they are a tricky audience that doesn't appreciate if their classic gets destroyed.
On the other hand, lots of completely original properties have become classics.
So I'd say in this environment, buying an expensive, geeky property and then not using it properly, simply doesn't even lead to easy money anymore.
So what's the point then, just to piss of people? Honestly it often feels like it.
The only parts of the show I enjoyed was the segments about the Emperor(s), which was a completely new invention of the show. It felt like somehow the writing A-team had snuck off to make some kind of weird original scifi thing, while the B-team was writing the “main” Foundation centered plot.
Putting aside any love for the books, I found the Foundation sections to be bad on their own terms. I stopped watching when the gang did a Call Of Duty mission into a ghost ship.