Something to watch tonight: Thursday 20 July

Foundation is streaming on AppleTV+

Based on a beloved series of nov­els by Isaac Asimov and adap­ted by David S. Goyer who wrote Blade, Batman Begins and Constantine, Foundation is the kind of clas­sic sci­ence fic­tion that we were told wasn’t fash­ion­able any more. No com­ic book whakapapa, no plastic toy her­it­age. Just pure inven­tion of fant­ast­ic­al worlds and amaz­ing technology.

Conceived as a monu­ment­al state­ment of intent from Apple when it launched its stream­ing ser­vice in 2019, it may have passed lots of poten­tial view­ers by when it first streamed in 2021. After all, AppleTV+ only had a few shows (and no leg­acy con­tent) and rel­at­ively low sub­scriber num­bers. The books were long thought to be unadapt­able and also old – the last book in the ori­gin­al tri­logy came out in 1953.

But the series was (and is – Season Two epis­odes have just star­ted drop­ping) a vehicle for some of the most visu­ally stun­ning tele­vi­sion ever made.

I con­fess that more than 20 months after the last epis­ode of sea­son one I can now remem­ber very little of the epic multi-timeline plot and will have to go back and rewatch a few epis­odes to remind myself what’s going on. But lots of the set-pieces are seared in my brain and I feel con­fid­ent in say­ing that you haven’t seen any­thing quite like this.

Season three is cur­rently in pro­duc­tion – at least it was until the strikes – so an invest­ment of time in sea­son one won’t be wasted. Watch it on the biggest screen you can find.

With the stream­ing eco­nomy on a pre­cip­ice it may well be that only a 3 tril­lion dol­lar com­pany like Apple can afford to make any­thing like this now.