Personally I kinda liked the first season. It’s better if you forget the original Asimov story and just watch it as its own thing because it diverges from it quite a bit.
Season 2 Full Trailer - Youtube
Looking forward to see where they go after that ballsy season 1 ending. Lee Pace will continue to kill it no doubt.
I’m not going to shit on your excitement, I just want to give my perspective (and I liked the show!).
You’re right, this is a series that “builds a world”. The main grip I (as many others) have, in relation to the books, is that the books build a universe and a whole history, in addition to the series. The characters themselves, aside from Hari Seldon and a couple of others, are relatively unimportant, and that’s the beauty of it: it’s a way of showing how psychohistory works, by not focusing on the individual but the whole society around them.
This, of course, is quite difficult to translate to screen, but having one character being “the special one” goes really against the whole spirit of the worldbuilding set in the books (and that’s why I’m quite interested in seeing how they portray The Mule). The gender and ethnicity changes I couldn’t care less, but these kind of things… eh, they strip the story of what made it special in the first place.