As a fan of the novels, I'm very disappointed in Season 1. IF it had been advertised as 'inspired by" Isaac Asimov's Foundation, I probably would have given the whole season a 5 or 6 rating judging it on its own merits.
But, claiming to be "based on" Asimov's work, there are too many deviations. Demerzel as a robot was terrible. I had no issues with it being recast as a woman, same as with Gael and Salvor Hardin. Asimov's works were written in a male dominated society with a male target audience.
I'm issues were the fact that there is no way the original robot who developed and adopted the "zeroth" Law of Robotics would have directly killed someone. Salvor was a Trader, not warrior, who was noted for his anti-violence quote "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.". I'm also having a hard time w/ the Salvor/Gael relationship due to the similar ages of the actresses.
The jumping through time, forward and back made it hard to follow.
What happened to "Psycohistory"? This seems more about the Cleon's and the Empire.
As to the acting, I think the cast did a pretty good job of portraying what the script asked of them. I didn't necessarily like the acting, but it didn't really detract for me. The boring monologs did that for me.
The Foundation writers & producers should watch Amazon Prime's "Wheel of Time" Season 1 and read the books by Robert Jordan to see what "based on" looks like. Were there some changes, yes. But the Producer was very open with why he made that change. It will be interesting to see how much gets crammed into Season 1. There's enough material in each book to make several seasons out of, especially the later books, so there could be 15 seasons or more unless they cut out massive parts of the books. So far, this is much more faithful to the books that Foundation is.
I won't be keeping my Apple TV+ subscription beyond the free 12 months I got last year if this is the crap I get for $5/mo.