Disclaimers first: Yes, huge fan of the books. But also, just fine with adaptations, new ideas, even remakes! A favorite hobby is annoying people by telling them their "original" movie was already a remake of an older one, or is from a book :)
So went into this without even reading much about it. Don't care how they approached it, let's see what they did?
And the only reason I finished the season is that it's Foundation and I felt I should. If just some random new SF show I would have stopped before the end of the first episode.
It is mostly poorly acted. Jared Harris is awesome at everything. Everyone else is... enh. Arch. Scenery chewing. Stilted. They also mostly have bad dialog. And the art direction and FX are mediocre. Let's dig into that.
I see lots of reviews who don't love it saying "but it's visually stunning." No, it's not. It's bog-standard SF stuff, the most forgettable cities and spaceships. There's talk of the many levels on Trantor but... they aren't really shown. The Fifth Element had - incidentally, not critical the story though it was fun - a much better sense of a megalopolis that built up. Trantor is Star Trek Next Gen Alien City #327.
And the story. It's not just Not Really The Source, but is... terrible. Who cares about the empire? Why terrorism? Why bad physics... sorry, also annoying but so typical for bad SF it's hardly worth mentioning. A ten-thousand-year tale of preserving the empire should not be typical angsty teen cliffhangers every episode.
Also, mean-spirited. Not in the political sense, which it needed, but hangings and disintegrating palace artists and destroying planets, and stabbing people for what reason and... oh, just who cares? So dumb-bad. So disappointing.
