‘Foundation’ Showrunner David S. Goyer on Creating the Year’s Most Exciting Show — And Why He Doesn’t Want You To Binge It

It was 2023’s most pleasant television surprise. After an inconsistent but promising first season, Foundation — Apple TV+’s epic adaptation of author Isaac Asimov’s seminal science-fiction novels — returned for Season 2 and became one of the very best shows on TV. Always smart, often sexy, and frequently spectacular, it’s the best-looking science-fantasy series going (give or take a House of the Dragon), whether that means its impeccably designed spaceships, its nearly psychedelic color palette, or having Lee Pace’s deranged Emperor Cleon fight assassins in the nude. But it also has big ideas, from Asimov’s prescient sci-fi concepts to the question of how to remain hopeful and humane in the face of accelerating catastrophes. Not since Game of Thrones at its height has a genre show been both this ambitious and this successful.

Just as the brilliant mathematician Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) holds the future of the universe in his head, creator and showrunner David S. Goyer holds the future of Foundation in his. Talking to the storied writer-producer feels a bit like talking to Seldon in that he seems to anticipate your every move, answering questions you haven’t even asked yet. Throughout, he shows a deep affinity for the crew, the cast, the source material, the audience, and the little storytelling tricks that can tie them all together. 

About the only thing Goyer doesn’t seem to know about Foundation is its immediate future: “Hopefully we’ll get word about a Season 3 soon,” he says. Judging from our conversation from earlier this week, he’s ready.

DECIDER: On a big-picture level, what were you hoping to accomplish with this season?

DAVID S. GOYER: Broaden the audience. Broaden the palate of how we’re painting. By that, I mean seeing more appropriate moments of humor, more characters that are humorous — not to make it a comedy, but just to flesh that out more. Lean into the pathos. Lean into the melodrama. Lean into the romance. Essentially, that was the remit.

Then we sat down and said, “Okay, what are the things we did well? What are the things we could do better at?” I call it “going back into our toolbox”: How can we turn some of the relationships on their head? How can we take what we’ve learned about Demerzel, for instance, and subvert expectations? Or knowing that Day and Dusk are different characters [than the Day and Dusk of Season 1], but on some level, because they’re the same actors, the audience is going to import the feelings about those characters into the next season — how can we play on that?

So Dawn was led into a honeytrap and had his neck snapped in Season 1. Well, it’s like Dawn is going that way in Season 2, but then, subverting that for an audience, we give that Dawn a happy ending. Or presenting Demerzel as this puppet master behind everything, but then flipping it on its head and showing you that she’s as much a victim as anyone by the end of the season. Or playing around with the audience’s expectations of Hari Seldon as this very smug, aloof character by giving at least one of the Seldons feet of clay, humanizing him, literally getting his feet in the water and his hands dirty — and having him kill someone like a caveman. It’s really just thinking about how we can zig where we zag, and how can we have fun with it?

Also, how can we subvert some of the expectations now that the audience has been weaned on shows like Game of Thrones, and they expect certain things to happen in a certain way or a certain cadence? When a show surprises me as an audience member, that’s when you really get the audience by the jugular. It’s just like when Game of Thrones killed Ned Stark in the first season. That was so revelatory when it happened, right? Now, the audience has almost come to expect it. So we did the opposite: We resurrected Hari. We were seeing what rules we could break.

The canvas of the show is broader this season, in part because you introduce a plethora of new characters. It didn’t occur to me until this season that, by nature of how time passes in the series, you’re going to be resetting the cast on a fairly regular basis.

Yeah, a significant portion of the cast. You’ve got some characters that will continue in some for or another through the tropes of science fiction — Hari Seldon, the clone Cleons. But the fact that we could introduce all these new characters, and the audience would absolutely fall in love with them and cry when they die, shows me that we can do that again in subsequent seasons. The expectation, when we started Season 2, is that the audience would not become as invested in the new characters. But the audience loved the new characters! The audience doesn’t want to see them go! More than anything, that response leads me to believe that our approach to the show can work.

But also, the audience had come to believe, because of Season 1, that our core six or seven characters had plot armor — I’m talking about Salvor Hardin in this case — and that those characters would never die. I thought it was important to show that this was mistaken, that the audience shouldn’t be making too many assumptions.

You also have to be aware of how your show is being consumed. I’m glad Foundation’s dropping week to week and it’s not being binged, because there’s a lot to unpack. That allows people, if they want, to watch the episodes more than once before the next one drops. It allows them to go on message boards, or watch the shows on YouTube that have sprung up analyzing the show. Our show was designed to drop once a week, and designed for people to be able to pick apart things, and not designed to be binged. Which doesn’t mean some people won’t watch it as a binge — I really don’t know what that experience would be like, but hopefully it’s still a good experience. But we’re trying to be aware of the broader ecoysystem in which the show exists, the way in which the audience watches things, the patterns that form.

Foundation may be the most expensive-looking show on television, and a large part of that is how beautifully and unpredictably designed all the sci-fi stuff is — the spaceships, the interiors, how light-speed travel is depeicted. I mean, I really can’t think of many other shows where in addition to remembering characters, I remember specific spaceships. 

It’s the team that works on it. The principals in my art department and the principals in my VFX department have stayed with me for the last five years: Rory Cheyne is my production designer, Chris MacLean is my VFX supervisor, and many of the people working beneath them both are still with us, still incredibly close. So it’s primarily the three of us that are responsible for the overall aesthetic of the show, vibing off one another.

Foundation, as a series of stories or books, has somewhat been strip mined in the preceding decades, whether it be by Star Wars or Dune. So we’re constantly talking about, how can we now reinvent the wheel? How can we not do what Star Wars or Ridley Scott or Star Trek did?

A lot of that goes back to our very first meetings, when we were describing the imperial ships. I said that I wanted the ships to look like vertical daggers, so if they were hovering over something, it was like the sword of Damocles — I often use writerly phrases [laughs] — hanging over someone. And I wanted the ships, in Empire’s arrogance, to literally cut through spacetime like a knife. In Season 2, with the Foundation’s whisper ships, I said, well, the Foundation are more nimble, they’re more elegant — they don’t slash through spacetime, they can do a pinprick. That led us to change the design of both the ships and the singularities they created. 

And when we described the Prime Radiant, I said, “I don’t want to see Roman numerals, and I don’t want to see A Beautiful Mind.” The phrase I used was “the language of angels.” I wanted it to be beautiful. That leads to, well, how do you make math beautiful? Lots of different iterations and lots of different artists coming up with style frames. And the way we depict math led to the way we depict holograms and the way we depict the “active chroma” palace mural, which led to the way the title sequence is designed. The process is very step by step and very holistic.

It seems to me the selling point of this show for TV audience is that you have this pair of killers in Jared Harris and Lee Pace at the forefront. But whenever you see one of the other cast members with these guys, they can totally hang. You don’t even notice it. That became especially apparent this season, as all kinds of new character combinations emerged for actors to bounce off each other.

Part of that was deliberate. We said, “What are characters that can have scenes together that didn’t before? What do those characters bring to the table? How does that change the nature of the scene? So if you have a character like Hober Mallow, who uses comedy as a defense and is an unserious person, well, what is a scene between Hober Mallow and Hari Seldon like? It’s not going to be the same as when Hari Seldon is speaking at a trial, or to the emperor of the galaxy.  What’s a scene like between Hari Seldon and Salvor — a very plainspoken woman of action? That’s going to be different as well.

I will say we are meticulous about the casting. For all the major characters, if it’s not a straight offer — and most of them aren’t — we read hundreds of actors. There’s a winnowing-down process, but even me myself, I may see eighty or nienty actors read for each of those roles, like for Constant.. Then we go through a further winnowing process, and chemistry read perhaps three or four of those people with three or four other characters. But even tertiary characters, characters that only have a scene or two, we still hopefully read fifty, sixty actors. 

We’re aware of the fact that we’ve got actors like Lee Pace and Jared Harris, and that we can’t just plunk anyone into one of those smaller roles, or it’s going to break the suspension of disbelief. That is our motto: Every one of these people has to be able to stand toe to toe with Jared Harris.

Thank you again for taking the time to talk. I’m so excited I got to pick your brain about it.

Thank you so much. Hopefully we’ll get word about a Foundation Season 3 soon.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, after the victory of the WGA in their own strike over similar issues. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the show being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.