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Comment by Rerarom | Hacker News Reader

You can make a lot of changes without pissing on its main themes. E.g. there are a lot of characters and scenes which were just sketched and the show could have filled them in instead of inventing whole new plots out of cloth. Also Hardin being a Chosen One and the producer insisting on reddit that "it's not really so, you'll see" but he could have just not made it look like it is so. Another thing would have been to compress everything until Bel Riose in the 1st season, since it's only afterwards that Asimov really matures as a writer.

It's not like I don't enjoy anything (the Empire plot is solid even though it's not at all from the books, proof that I'm not a purist or anything), but everything just shows a lack of interest in being faithful to the main ideas of the books.

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> Also Hardin being a Chosen One and the producer insisting on reddit that "it's not really so

Almost all modern TV in the Scifi & Fantasy tropes relies on the the Hero's Journey. It is very hard not to use it especially if you want a large audience. To faithfully recreate Foundation for TV, you'd have to make a fake documentary and that just doesn't draw enough people to make the budget work

But if you want your show to be a success you have to take chances.

If they make just another derivative show they can’t be surprised by the poor reception.

(Besides I’m not sure I agree with the premise. Game of Thrones was a big success and it was much more complex than a simple Hero’s Journey.)

Particularly since one of the two characters on the hero's journey for a majority of fans turned evil in the last two episodes. And that the one who ended up in the seat of power at the end had a different kind of journey.

Arguably, framing Hardin as a "Hero's Journey" is the show taking chances versus the relatively much more dry source material. As Seldon says time and again, psychohistory can only predict the actions of large enough groups of people, it cannot predict the actions of individuals. From that perspective alone, I've found so far I mostly appreciate the twists the show is taking on the source material. Most of them seem to me to be individual actions within the overall predictions of psychohistory (treating the books as one prediction versus reality/timeline and the show as another).

GoT was also a Hero's Journey story. The difference is that it involved more than one character i.e. the Starks, etc...

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