Apple TV's Epic Sci-Fi Series Succeeded by Ignoring the Books It's Based On

Published Aug 3, 2026, 7:52 PM EDT

Julio is a Senior Author for Collider. He studied History and International Relations at university, but found his calling in cultural journalism. When he isn’t writing, Julio also teaches English at a nearby school. He has lived in São Paulo most of his life, where he covers CCXP and other big events. Having loved movies, music, and TV from an early age, he prides himself in knowing every minute detail about the things he loves. When he is older, he dreams of owning a movie theater in a small countryside town.

There are certain books that often feel like “too much” for a visual media adaptation, and yet, the streaming age has proven time and time again that nothing is really “unadaptable.” Perhaps the best example of how things have improved in this sense is Apple TV’s Foundation, which adapts Isaac Asimov’s seminal science fiction series of books about humanity surviving a thousand years of dark ages after the fall of the Galactic Empire. The streamer, however, made many, many tweaks and changes to Asimov’s source material. This initially angered some fans, but, as Foundation progressed until its recent third season (with the fourth on the way), most of these changes proved to be necessary adjustments and improvements to the original to thrive on streaming, leading to some of the best new concepts in recent sci-fi.

Asimov’s Foundation is one of the pillars of science fiction literature, mostly because of how it introduces concepts that feel both wildly imaginative and timely to the early 1950s when the series came out. Chief among them is psychohistory, a field of study that predicts the course of civilization and essentially turns humanity’s future into an exact science. Its creator, Hari Seldon (Jared Harris), predicts the fall of the Empire will lead to 30,000 years of dark ages, but, with psychohistory, he devises a plan that reduces it to a single millennium.

Your answers point to the iconic sci-fi hero who shares your instincts, your values, and your particular way of facing the impossible.

You carry a weight most people would crumble under — the knowledge of what you’re capable of, and the burden of what you might have to become.

You lead with instinct, warmth, and an absolute refusal to accept a no-win scenario — because you’ve always believed there’s a third option nobody else has thought of yet.

You are the kind of person who holds the line when everyone else is losing faith — not because you’re fearless, but because giving up simply isn’t something you’re capable of.

You are not reckless, not grandiose, and not particularly interested in being anyone’s hero — you just refuse to stop when it matters.

You have been through fire that would break most people — and what came out the other side is something the world underestimates at its peril.

Taking Foundation to the screens without tackling psychohistory is simply impossible, but series creator David S. Goyer goes above and beyond by introducing his own original and wildly imaginative concepts to illustrate how and why the Empire falls. The Genetic Dynasty, a triumvirate of clones of the original Emperor Cleon, is the best example. Like Asimov’s Foundation, this also works as a subtle political commentary; the world is filled with egotistical “leaders” who would love to clone themselves to prolong their power as much as possible. Is there a more believable reason for inevitable societal collapse?

While the Cleon variations — Brother Day (Lee Pace), Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton), and Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann) — are original characters, the series has to inevitably incorporate book characters, only changing them to serve this story’s purposes. They may seem unrecognizable to book readers, like Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey), and Demerzel (Laura Birn), but ultimately work very well within the series’ own variation of the original story. After all, truth be told, adapting Asimov’s Foundation as it is is virtually impossible.

Naturally, every novel requires no small degree of adaptation to be taken to screens big and small, but Foundation is its own special case. That’s because it’s not technically a novel, but an anthology comprising short stories published separately by Asimov in science fiction publications before being compiled in a book trilogy. **Each story takes place in its own period and features its own set of characters **as they confront the crises predicted by Seldon or navigate other defining moments, which doesn’t really work in visual media.

To remedy this, Goyer had to essentially remix the original story to fit the series. As he once mentioned, his pitch to Apple was simple, framing his Foundation as “a 1,000-year chess game between Hari Seldon and the Empire,” with the surrounding characters as “the pawns, but some of the pawns over the course of this saga end up becoming kings and queens.” Expanding characters like Gaal Dornick and Demerzel, introducing the Genetic Dynasty, and creating narrative devices that bridge centuries serve exactly this purpose without abandoning Asimov’s grand vision of history.

So, as different as it seems from the original, what the Apple TV adaptation does is reshape the original material instead of reproducing it. Maybe a completely faithful adaptation might have pleased some readers, but it also would have struggled to find an audience among others, and would certainly alienate those who have never read the books. Ironically, Foundation succeeds because it understands that translating a story to a new medium sometimes requires rewriting it.

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