Before a rushed ending soured the “Game of Thrones” fanbase on show runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the duo had rightfully earned acclaim for wrangling a seemingly unadaptable series of books into a damn good adaptation.
Author and screenwriter George R.R. Martin had written “A Song of Ice and Fire” as a partial response to the strictures of TV, crafting a story with the sprawling ensemble, major battles, sex, violence and abrupt demises he couldn’t work into scripts for the likes of NBC and CBS.
The book series kicked off in 1996, just a few years before the rise of premium cable culture drivers would make television more friendly to artistic ambition and less subject to the FCC. Aided by a stellar cast and strong support from HBO, Benioff and Weiss nonetheless did exceptional work translating Martin’s vision into a nuanced drama with a deep bench of antiheroes and competing points of view. Before “Game of Thrones” was a juggernaut and, eventually, a disappointment, it was a smart, considered, and palpably affectionate take on its source material.
For their next big swing, the producers have teamed up with “True Blood” alumnus Alexander Woo to take on an even steeper challenge. The Chinese science fiction trilogy “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” spans hundreds of years, mostly unconnected characters and several multi-page exegeses on the ABCs of particle physics. To turn writer Cixin Liu’s creation into a Netflix series, the team would have to do more than marshal resources or re-earn the trust of those burnt by how “Game of Thrones” limped across the finish line. This adaptation demands re-conceiving large chunks of plot from the ground-up while retaining Liu’s themes, not to mention visualizing concepts with less precedent onscreen than the fantasy tropes Martin deployed and subverted. The result shows some of the strain of this Herculean task, but also proves the early seasons of “Thrones” were neither a fluke nor a testament to Martin alone. Benioff and Weiss remain master adaptors, and together with Woo, they’ve opened an accessible entry point into a deeply esoteric story while rendering the action in a suitably epic scope.
“The Three Body Problem” and “3 Body Problem” — the title of Liu’s first volume altered enough to differentiate book from show, though not enough to avoid confusion — start in the same time and place. As the Cultural Revolution tears through China, young scientist Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) watches a mob beat her father to death in an anti-intellectual frenzy. The scene sets up one of the saga’s most powerful ideas: that a brilliant mind could grow so disillusioned with humankind they might turn their allegiance elsewhere, convinced our species is beyond hope of guiding its own destiny.
— Variety