Chris Peek

Great space opera sets, costuming, and CGI effects for a TV show (and I do love a good space opera), but specific characters aside, the story is very disconnected from, and tangential to, the core concept of the books. The Asimov story is only a very thinly traced outline that is being filled in with Star Wars-Star Trek-etc. tropes of all sorts and big dollops of dialed-up emotional drama and sex. In other words the usual suspects for TV fare. I get that the books were going to be difficult to translate to the screen when the dialog consisted mainly of conversations between intelligent, rational (for the most part) actors contending with each other, and debating about where a galactic scale sociological theory was taking them. The books spent some time and care discussing the hypothetical mechanisms of the theory. There are occasional touches on the Asimov narrative, but the injected, manufactured interpersonal drama takes up all the oxygen in the room. As of right now, when they refer to the mechanisms of the theory it's basically gibberspeak. The book centered around the development and evolution of this theory as it's premise, and explained the hypotheses in some detail. The TV show scripts might be better served to preserve a little of this core element of the books as a fig leaf to the action.