If you haven’t read The Three-Body Problem, the 2008 novel by the Chinese science-fiction writer Cixin Liu, you’ve probably seen or heard of others reading it — people on subways, people in airport terminals, or President Barack Obama, whose endorsement contributed to the book’s popularity in the United States. The book, a heady and dense “hard sci-fi” more interested in scientific theories than characters, was a viral hit in China and again in English translation. Liu wrote two sequels to form the cheekily titled “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy.
Following on the heels of a successful Chinese television adaptation, Three-Body, last year, David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo have unveiled a new Netflix adaptation, 3 Body Problem, for the Anglophone world. Benioff and Weiss are most famous for showrunning HBO’s Game of Thrones, also drawn from a complicated book series that seemed both irresistible to adaptation and unadaptable. Their new eight-episode series based on Liu’s books preserves their core while softening the aspects that might limit the audience. Unfortunately, the outcome is middling and forgettable.
Liu’s novel was a high-concept, dense, and sometimes convoluted exploration of humanity’s place in the universe. To the extent that the novel worked, it did so by using relatively brisk pacing, a sense of mystery, and intriguing ideas and thought experiments to pull readers through sometimes clunky writing filled with difficult-to-distinguish characters and frequent expository asides about physics and nanotechnology. It was also very much set in China and written for a Chinese audience. Ken Liu’s English translation makes frequent use of footnotes to explain cultural and political subtleties lost on U.S. readers. (A typical note: “Mozi was the founder of the Mohist school of philosophy during the Warring States Period.”)
Netflix’s 3 Body Problem appears to be the first season of a longer series and covers content from the first book and part of the second. The show hews to the books’ essential ideas and plot throughlines but rewrites many of the characters to transport part of the action to the West, in one case turning a Chinese character from the book into multiple British, American, and Australian ones. This makes sense, from a screenwriting and marketing point of view, but also has a diluting effect. Similarly, the show’s decision to Westernize some of the plot, while logical, is a bit of a shame since the novel’s Chinese perspective is part of what made it a fascinating document.
As with the book, the series follows two timelines. The earlier one, set during China’s Cultural Revolution and in Chinese dialogue, takes up less of the show but is in some ways more interesting. It follows Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), a young Chinese astrophysicist from an academic family whose scientist father is killed by his own students during a struggle session. Disgraced and deemed a class enemy of the Revolution, she suffers in a grueling labor camp near Mongolia before being recruited to take part in a top-secret program of the Chinese military, with ramifications for the present day.
3 Body Problem’s decision to open with this first timeline, which depicts the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution vividly and with an almost surprising frankness, injects the show with a nice jolt of starting energy. Sadly, some of that energy is to seep away quickly. The show is also probably wise to tell its story mostly in historical progression, like the novel’s English translation but unlike the original Chinese text, which famously placed the Cultural Revolution sequences further in, as flashbacks, to make them less conspicuous to Chinese censors.
The second timeline takes place in the present day, mostly in England. A mysterious and high-placed British intelligence official, Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham, whom some viewers will recognize from Game of Thrones, and whose character makes a joke of the fact that he’s actually Irish), assigns a detective, Clarence (an enjoyable Benedict Wong), to investigate why several prominent British scientists recently suffered odd, seemingly unprompted nervous breakdowns culminating in suicide. The detective, a straight-talking, chain-smoking maverick, of course, soon discovers more cases: Other scientists, particularly physicists working on rarified and advanced research, have been dying across the world.
A group of friends in Britain who know one another from graduate research at Oxford also get sucked into these developments. The group includes the hedonistic Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), who works at an accelerator, his self-serious occasional girlfriend Auggie Salazar (Eiza Gonzalez), who leads a nanofiber startup, and Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), who figures out that there’s something strange going on after a shadowy organization invites her to use a hyper-advanced virtual reality headset to play a cryptic and seemingly impossible video game.
The other friends in the group are two oddball ex-scientists: the goofy Jack Rooney (John Bradley), who quit academia to start a successful snack food company, and Will Downing (Alex Sharp), a morose self-deprecator who washed out because he believed he wasn’t smart enough. There are too many other characters to get into, though the veteran actor Jonathan Pryce does make a surprise cameo. Bradley’s comical, outsize Rooney seems like an implicit acknowledgment that some of the show’s characters are kind of a tough hang, a bit dull, somehow both irritatingly cynical and irritatingly earnest.
I can’t give too much more away, though I will say that there are some genuinely interesting plot developments that raise stimulating intellectual questions about the sort of scenarios that films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Arrival (2016), Annihilation (2018), and Tenet (2020) explore. There is also some clanging exposition (“You still demonstrate great potential for future scientific accomplishment,” a character tells another), a maudlin illness subplot, leaps of logic that I’m not sure always make sense, and an anticlimactic finale that is a real letdown after eight hours of uneven television. The series’ big setpieces are mostly underwhelming, except for one that is so over-the-top (and narratively questionable) as to jump the shark.
With some tweaks, the show could pull things together and come back for a stronger sophomore season, but it’ll need work. 3 Body Problem wants to be Netflix’s answer to Tenet, but so far, it feels like Christopher Nolan before his first cup of strong black tea.
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J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.