In science, a three-body problem is defined as a problem in computing the trajectory of three bodies interacting with one another.
What happens then when showrunners of two of the biggest franchises in TV pop culture, the biggest streaming platform and one of the most acclaimed science-fiction novels of all time intersect?
You get Netflix’s “3 Body Problem,” an eight-episode series premiering on March 21.
The showrunners are David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, in their first outing since “Game of Thrones,” and Alex Woo of “True Blood” (ironically, both series from rival HBO). The novel is 2008’s “The Three Body Problem” from Chinese author Cixim Liu, the first of three books in the “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy, and the first Chinese novel to win the prestigious Hugo Award for Best Novel. The trilogy is considered one of the greatest works in all of science fiction and impossible to translate to the screen, like Frank Herbert’s “Dune.”
Before the duo of Benioff and Weiss signed on with Netflix, they were asked to read the Ken Liu’s 2014 English translation of the first book. “I finished it on a plane,” Benioff tells Super. “We were flying home from Japan. And Dan was a few aisles over and he came over and he just finished it. We finished right around the same time. We said, ‘we’re gonna do this right?’”
1960s Beijing
The series begins in 1960s Beijing, where the Cultural Revolution is in full brutal swing, with intellectuals being incarcerated, tortured or executed. Astrophysics student Ye Wenjie helplessly looks on as her father is killed, something that will have huge consequences in the future. Speaking of the future, scientists are taking their own lives and their projects are failing. A brilliant group called the Oxford Five led by Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) and Jack Rooney (Sam Bradley) seek to figure out why. Also on the case are shadowy intelligence operative Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) and colleague Da Shi (Benedict Wong). Meanwhile, billionaire environmentalist Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce) is carrying out some kind of plan of his own. There is also the sudden appearance of an extreme immersive virtual game where the players have to save civilizations from climate disasters. All this will collide, of course, and the world will never be the same.
What attracted them to the project? “I think what we were looking for was something different,” he explains. “We loved our time on ‘Thrones,’ but we’re going to move on to something else. We thought about science fiction, but a lot of the science fiction stuff we read, felt familiar and felt like oh, this is pretty good, but it feels a lot like you know, ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ or whatever. So, we wanted something different. There is nothing I’ve encountered that’s like this story. We were really mesmerized by just the sheer the difficulty of adaptation and the idea of doing something that was completely fresh.”
Difficulties of adaptation
Of the difficulties of adaptation, Woo says, “the crucial one is that it’s a completely different medium from the novel format to the television format. And it’s not as easy as painting-by-numbers and just cutting and pasting bits of dialogue. It’s a different kind of experience. Take the science in the novel, if something is very difficult, you can read it slower. You can go back, you can stop, you can look at things, you can look it up on the internet. On a television show, you shouldn’t have to do that. It should all flow in front of you. A lot of people who are going to be watching are not going to be physicists. The science that we were presenting, even if there were difficult concepts, needed to be understandable.”
Netflix’s series is adapted mostly from the first book. The original book was completely stocked with Chinese characters and it was up to the showrunners to turn the book into something attractive to a worldwide audience. Having immense respect for the source material, the three consulted with the author Liu, who gave his stamp of sci-fi approval. It took some nine months to complete shooting “3 Body Problem” in England’s Shepperton Studios, from 2021 to 2022, and also shooting in the nearby English areas. There was additional photography in New York, Florida and Spain. Providing the stunning atmosphere (and they are stunning) are a mix of old and new collaborators: production designer Deborah Riley, VFX producer Steve Kullback, director of photography Jonathan Freeman, director Jeremy Podeswa and composer Ramin Djawadi.
‘Mind-blowing’
What is so interesting about “3 Body Problem” is that it starts off as political commentary and a murder mystery but transforms steadily into something bigger and a word that Benioff like using, “mind-blowing.” Was this planned or more organic? “I think it’s a complicated question to answer,” Benioff says. “Some things came from initial planning, and some things came from just over the course of the years we’ve spent working on this first season. One thing that really drew us to the novels is that they don’t start on a spaceship in the outer reaches of the Andromeda Galaxy. It starts in the 1960s in Beijing, and it’s very grounded and you’re with a young woman as she watches her father beaten to death and it doesn’t feel like you’re reading a science fiction novel at all. In fact, for quite some time in the book, it has that feeling that you’re reading a historical novel. We really loved what Cixin Liu had done—he started in this very grounded love, he made sure you knew the characters, he made sure that you believed in this world. It’s one thing we took from ‘Thrones’ to this: until you care about the characters, it doesn’t matter.”
Woo agrees: “All three of us have a very strong belief that the core of a series is the characters. The characters are what propels you from one episode to the next and one season to the next. And that’s what makes you really care about the show… We want our characters to be at the center. In the books, they are parsed out over all three novels and a lot of them don’t even meet each other, even though they exist at the same time periods. So a choice that we made from the very beginning was to bring those characters together and have them have shared paths.”
Jaw-dropping scenes
“3 Body Problem” is not only sci-fi, it is heavy, heavy sci-fi, so viewers should brace themselves for some serious science, but the cinematography and the CGI are gorgeous, allowing the show to create some truly jaw-dropping scenes. The show’s secrets are also quite revelatory and, once everything comes out, the series satisfies. But the series only adapts the first book. Will Netflix adapt the other two, in which (no spoilers) things get much, much more “mind-blowing”? Weiss says, “I know it’s crazy, right? They definitely should let us make the whole series. Yeah, the intention would definitely be to go through the entire series of books because we thought they were beautiful and powerful and surreal. I think we have a very good idea of what we would do for the second season of the show. And the third season, it’s more like there are landmarks… I don’t know how we’ll do it. By that point, the characters we have created will be their own characters in conjunction with the actors themselves. How those characters will flow through that landscape is far, far away that we don’t know until we get closer to it.” Perhaps there is much more to the creative intersection that is“3 Body Problem” than it seems.
Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” drops on March 21.
