>I haven’t read the books, but I found Gaal Dornick and Salvor Hardnick’s storylines very difficult to follow. The actors felt miscast and the character development felt extremely rushed.
As I said, it seems that a lot of the story has been sacrificed to the altar of "what works on TV." Which is really dumb IMO, but happens all the time.
In the novels (which I really do recommend highly!), the former is a minor character and the latter is much, much more than the series makes out.
If I had to hazard a guess, the treatment of those characters is an attempt to appeal to the female 18-34 demographic more than anything else.
Which gives Asimov's storytelling short shrift.
For what it is, the first season of the TV series (which covers the first third or so of the first novel), is so far from the novel that I kept saying "what the hell just happened?" "That makes no sense!" and "I hope Asimov's estate was compensated handsomely for this. That's the only good that could come out of it!"
That said, I tried in my submission, to ignore the novels and look at the TV "adaptation" separately. And the best I could come up with was "the production values were high" and "the story line wasn't too terrible."
I torrented the episodes, even though I have a free six-month subscription to AppleTV+.
Given that it's been my only experience with Apple's productions, I certainly won't be using, let alone renewing that subscription.
Then again, as a middle-aged man, the series is definitely not geared toward me. Perhaps it will find success with the target demographic.
But do go and read the original trilogy and, if it sparks your interest, the follow-on novels as well. They are much more coherent and tell an interesting story with astonishing scope.