3 Body Problem is adapted from the first book of a trilogy by author Liu Cixin. It's a story about an alien race coming to invade Earth with ominous intent. Constricted by travel time, they will not arrive for 400 years. But through advanced technology, and aided by willing humans on Earth, there's plenty of mayhem they can cause in the meantime.
A lot of the online talk about the series focused on the creators of the TV show: David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo. It's the first two getting all the attention, as they're the team behind Game of Thrones. Many reviews focused on the question, had they bungled this the way they bungled Game of Thrones?
One angle on that was to focus on the changes between the show and the original book. I haven't read that book, but I know that the author (writing in Chinese) created a cast of Chinese characters. The TV series changed most of them to other nationalities, simultaneously improving diversity and opening itself up to accusations of whitewashing. To me, these changes ultimately seem necessary to make a TV show you intend to be watched by a Western audience. (You might as well complain about why so many theoretical scientists are conspicuously attractive. That's television.) If these changes rub you the wrong way, the book still exists -- though you should acknowledge that unless you're going to read it in the original Chinese, you're already reading an adaptation of sorts.
The rest of the criticism toward Benioff and Weiss centered on the final, badly-received season of Game of Thrones -- and I think it misses something very critical. The writing duo are actually very good at adaptation. The first five or six seasons of Game of Thrones were widely acclaimed, grew in popularity over time, and were almost always exciting and entertaining to watch. Those were the seasons based on material already published by George R.R. Martin. You know, adaptations. When the show ran out of runway, caught up with the published books, and had to begin telling the story for the first time rather than the second? Well, writing good original screenplays is a different skill than writing good adaptations, and Benioff and Weiss (unfortunately) revealed they weren't as good as that.
All of that is my long walk to say that 3 Body Problem (its first season, and the new episodes Netflix has announced will happen) are adapted from finished novels. Which means this is something these two show runners can do well. And I think they did so here. I found the eight episodes so far to be increasingly interesting. So much about the story seems intellectually stimulating to me. You have an antagonist that's both abstract and concrete, passive and deadly, sympathetic and menacing. You have real fantastical elements of science fiction underpinned by a desire to portray much more realistic science than the average sci-fi tale. Terrifying stakes for the entire world are skillfully balanced against very small but equally important personal stakes for the handful of main characters. Sure, all of that doubtlessly comes from the source material... but preserving that in a jump to another medium is what good adaptation is all about.
I love how the series kept me guessing from episode to episode. It routinely offered up plot twists you could see coming and feel clever about anticipating... seemingly just so that you'd be blindsided by other revelations hidden one level deeper than that. I became utterly convinced that I'd sussed out what form a second season of the show will take... but the way that the final episode of season one actually ended left me doubting that certainty.
The characters aren't necessarily the most standout element of the show, but there are a few performances that caught my eye. Rosalind Chao is great as Dr. Ye Wenjie, portraying a very difficult internal journey through carefully calibrated facial expressions. Benedict Wong is great as Clarence Shi, as close as this show gets to comic relief, served with a heaping side of exasperation. And the many returning Game of Thrones veterans are solid, though my personal favorite is Liam Cunningham, who ditches all the likability of his GoT character Davos to play proper asshole Thomas Wade.
Had Netflix opted not to continue the show, I'm quite confident I would have wanted to read the books to get the whole story. Even as it stands, the trilogy is now in my reading queue. I give 3 Body Problem a B+.
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