Lesley Goldberg for The Hollywood Reporter:
Apple continues to impressively cast its big-budget TV originals.
The tech company has tapped Chernobyl Emmy nominee Jared Harris and Halt and Catch Fire grad Lee Pace to lead the cast of space drama Foundation.
Based on Isaac Asimov’s novel series of the same name, Foundation chronicles the epic saga of The Foundation, a band of exiles who discover that the only way to save the Galactic Empire from destruction is to defy it.
Harris will star as Hari Seldon, a mathematical genius who predicts the demise of the empire. Pace is set as Brother Day, the current Emperor of the Galaxy.
MacDailyNews Take: It will be quite the achievement if Asimov’s sprawling saga can be condensed and adapted for an Apple TV+ series. We hope it’s successful as we’re looking forward to this one very, very much!
Whoa.
Too bad the description for the show sounds nothing like the series.
I am desperate for this to work out. I did a story board title sequence for the Foundation trilogy at Art College anticipating one day an adaptation would happen. That was in 1980 and now I am semi retired so a lot longer wait than I anticipated. That said films would have been difficult to pull off and a series seems the much better format to try to do it justice. However only in recent years have TV budgets and computer graphics not to mention the quality of actors willing to participate, seriously come together to really make it possible to do it justice I suspect. We shall see, but it allows natural breaks to occur as the story jumps forward hundreds of years every so often requiring if it’s true to the original whole new casts to be introduced as established cast members disappear. That is going to be a tough concept to carry off and indeed each jump a tough act to follow on various occasions for the casting if original cast members become much loved in their own right by the fanbase who then have to equally like the replacements. That is where I suspect the writers may have to make compromises on the original to minimalise tnis problem. At least Harris can mIntain some semblance of continuity in his central role and that I guess will be a prominant feature.
I wonder if they will film that particular sequence in the Steve Jobs theater as the natural symmetry and the obvious connections cannot be lost on those in the know.
I’ve been on the fence about whether to subscribe, but a Foundation series would convince me…
Brother Day????? Don’t they mean Cleon I?
Maybe it’s about time for some company with deep pockets to bring Larry Niven’s Ringworld series to the big screen.
Agreed. However, it pains me to say it, but I read a few years back that SYFY was going to work on that. Haven’t heard anything about it since then, so maybe they gave up on it. Their adaptations of various SF works has been less than stellar, to put it mildly.
Ringworld has been done.