We learned back in August 2018 that after picking up the rights in April 2018, Apple had given the Foundation series a ten-episode order for the first season. It’s set with David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman serving as executive producers and showrunners for it. Skydance’s David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Marcy Ross will also executive produce and it’ll also include Asimov’s daughter, Robyn Asimov. Rupert Sanders is set to direct the pilot.
Originally, the casting we had gotten included Jared Harris to play Hari Seldon and Lee Pace as Brother Day, the current Emperor of the Galaxy. Now, Deadline is reporting five more actors that have joined the production. Lou Llobell (Voyagers), Leah Harvey (Fighting with My Family, Les Misérables), Laura Birn (Helene, The Innocents), Terrence Mann (Sense8) and Cassian Bilton (A Devil’s Harmony) are set as series regulars.
“Llobell will play Gaal, a mathematical genius from a repressed rural planet. Harvey will portray Salvor, the protective and intuitive warden of a remote outer planet. Birn will play Demerzel the enigmatic aide to the Emperor of the Galaxy (Pace). Mann will portray Brother Dusk, the eldest living member of the ruling family. Bilton will play Brother Dawn, the youngest living member of the ruling family and next in line to be Brother Day.”
It’ll be quite some time before anything comes of it and the end result is definitely going to be different in many ways from the original novels. They were done as serialized storytelling in magazine form back in 1942 before they got collected and they’re very much of the time with few female characters at all. That changed more as Asimov – and science fiction in general – changed over the decades and as his work crossed with other of his properties.
Original Concept: For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Sheldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future–to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire–both scientists and scholars–and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the Galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for future generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.
But soon the fledgling Foundation finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. Mankind’s last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice: submit to the barbarians and be overrun–or fight them and be destroyed.
