Apple TV’s 3-Part Sci-Fi Masterpiece Is Doing What Star Wars Still Can’t

With The Mandalorian and Grogu looking like an overall flop, it’s interesting to see the Star Wars franchise struggling while the sci-fi and fantasy genres, in general, seem to be on the rise. Despite a few major hits, the Star Wars franchise has struggled to find its footing since joining Disney. Of course, there are many factors involved in this issue, but there’s one hit sci-fi series that encapsulates it perfectly — Apple TV‘s Foundation. The series doesn’t necessarily have much in common with Star Wars beyond its genre, but its approach to franchise growth is one Star Wars should take notes from, and the results speak for themselves.

Foundation is an adaptation of Isaac Asimov‘s novel series by the same name — a series that clearly inspired George Lucas when he was creating Star Wars back in the 1970s. At the time, some critics accused Lucas of “stealing” too many ideas from authors like Asimov for his movies. On the other hand, some praised the filmmaker for distilling the best parts of the sci-fi genre into films that would be more palatable to general audiences. Ironically, the situation is now reversed. While Star Wars can’t seem to get out of its own way, other sci-fi productions are using Lucas’ own methods to add heart to their stories and appeal to wider audiences — including Apple TV’s Foundation.

Modern ‘Star Wars’ Prioritizes Nostalgia While ‘Foundation’ Introduces Lore

Many critiques of newer Star Wars productions say that the franchise is too focused on its own “lore” to tell a good adventure story, but we can get more specific than that. In the last decade, Star Wars has been built mainly around nostalgia, not lore. Scripts go out of their way to visit a familiar place or talk to a familiar character rather than move the action forward. As for actual “lore” and worldbuilding, there’s less of that than ever in a galaxy far, far away. Disney actually limited the Star Wars canon quite a bit when it purchased the franchise, fearing casual fans would be alienated by deep-cut elements that had only been introduced in games or novels before.

By contrast, Asimov’s Foundation novels had very little in them but lore and worldbuilding. The series was packed with groundbreaking sci-fi concepts, and it took place on a galactic scale across time and space, leaving little space on the page for real character pathos. The TV show has filled in those blanks quite a bit. In the process, the show has deviated a lot from Asimov’s books, but it has been forgiven for that more than many other adaptations. That’s because fans can recognize when changes like that are in service to a good story, and when they’re bridging gaps rather than rewriting the author’s original work.

Apple TV’s Foundation maintains the scale and mythos of the novels — in some cases, it even surpasses the books with its implications of galactic culture and imperial power. Newer Star Wars movies, on the other hand, have repeatedly returned to the same few planets we’ve seen before, and even rehashed familiar storylines with slight twists. The sequel trilogy brought back a villain that had been defeated in the past, cheapening the previous movies in the process.

‘Star Wars’ Proved That Nothing is Truly ‘Unadaptable’

In recent years, studios have boasted that they’ve finally cracked the code and adapted novels that were previously regarded as “unfilmable” and “impossible to adapt” to the screen. It’s become a marketing term that has been applied to everything from Game of Thrones to Dune, and some have said the same thing in regard to Foundation. It’s worth noting that all of these “unadaptable” productions owe an immeasurable debt to the Star Wars franchise.

Star Wars essentially began with Lucas rising to this challenge himself. He borrowed elements from Dune, Foundation, and many other sci-fi stories that only existed on the page at the time, and would have seemed impossible to film. He and his company Industrial Light & Magic pioneered filmmaking techniques that are still in use today specifically to render these kinds of concepts on screen. Their work paved the way for shows like Foundation, even if the Star Wars franchise is now falling behind in terms of actual storytelling.

Hopefully, Star Wars will catch back up with the rest of its genre soon, but right now the best stories in sci-fi are playing out elsewhere. There are three seasons of Foundation streaming now on Apple TV, with a fourth in the works. All of the Star Wars franchise is streaming now on Disney+.

Release Date

September 23, 2021

Network

Apple TV+

Showrunner

David S. Goyer

Directors

Alex Graves, Roxann Dawson, Jennifer Phang, Mark Tonderai, Andrew Bernstein

Writers

Jane Espenson, Leigh Dana Jackson, Liz Phang, Eric Carrasco, David Kob, Addie Manis, Marcus Gardley, Lauren Bello, Olivia Purnell