The Big Picture
- Keeping viewers invested in the characters over 1,000 years is a major challenge in Apple TV+’s Foundation, but the series successfully uses sci-fi tropes to maintain continuity and keep familiar faces.
- Hari Seldon’s presence as a constant anchor in the story is critical for audience engagement, and the series does a great job of balancing its episodic nature while keeping characters relevant throughout the journey.
- While Season 2 of Foundation has been praised as an improvement over Season 1, fans are still waiting for a Season 3 renewal announcement.
When you gear up to tell a story as ambitious as the one covered in Apple TV+’s Foundation, one of the biggest challenges is to keep the audience invested in the characters throughout the seasons. This is especially difficult for this series, since its timeline spans over 1,000 years with the great majority of characters not being immortal. In an interview with Collider’s Therese Lacson, series creator and producer David S. Goyer talked about how he and his team manage to keep viewers hooked and not lose focus of the main story.
During the interview, Goyer said that he had to use every trick in the book within the sci-fi realm in order to keep characters’ presence and legacy spread out across the episodes. At the same time, the screenwriters needed to be mindful of not making the series feel anthological, since its overall story is the common thread with a beginning, middle and end.
“It’s trying to work around the anthological nature of particularly the first book. But also, the whole premise, if you’re trying to tell a 1000-year story, and not have it be an anthology, which no one was interested in supporting at this price point, figuring out how, through some of the tropes of science fiction, to keep some of these characters ongoing. And Hari Seldon [Jared Harris] himself — he exists in the prequels — but that was really the biggest challenge, is knowing that the audience would need that tether, some familiar faces to carry them from century to century to century. And because we have the tropes of one of the characters being a robot, and we invented the genetic dynasty, I thought that would be an interesting way to present at least the same faces to Empire, even though they are different characters. And then using things like cryo sleep to have Gaal [Lou Llobell] sleep from century to century, that was the biggest nut to crack.”
Hari Seldon’s Presence is One of the Anchors of ‘Foundation’
Both in the books and in the series, Hari Seldon makes a prediction with mathematic accuracy about the future of humanity. In the Isaac Asimov novels, Seldon’s presence is a constant, even though he isn’t revisited as much as he is in the series. In audiovisual productions, however, it’s much harder to get audiences invested if you don’t have a character for viewers to follow or root for. Fortunately, the sci-fi series does a great job of balancing its episodic nature and keeping characters relevant throughout the journey – especially on its second season, which has been praised as an improvement over Season 1.
Foundation was renewed for Season 2 ahead of the Season 1 premiere, but fans are still waiting for Apple TV+ to announce a Season 3 renewal. It’s pretty safe to assume it’s an expensive show to make, and with the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strike, it’s possible that the streamer is holding off on announcements until it’s finally time to keep going. In any case, Goyer has also revealed to Collider that Season 3 scripts are already written.
You can stream all episodes of Foundation on Apple TV+.
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Khushi Patel is a science fiction author who lives in Austin, Texas. She has published three novels, and her work has been praised for its originality and imagination. Khushi is a graduate of Rice University, and she has worked as a software engineer. She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and her books have been nominated for several awards.
