Game Of Thrones Creators Hope New Netflix Show Will Prove Haters Wrong In One Key Way
Before it became eponymous with shows that fell off in their final season and got everyone mad, "Game of Thrones" was once the biggest show on TV around the world. It helped revolutionize genre TV like "Lost" did in the 2000s, paving the way for titles like "Rings of Power" and "The Witcher," as every streamer sought their own big fantasy adaptation.
Now, after losing their horrible-sounding alt-history slavery drama and also their "Star Wars" movie about the first Jedi, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are back on TV and working with writer Alexander Woo on another show based on a book long considered unadaptable — "3 Body Problem." Adapted from Liu Cixin's book trilogy of the same name, this is a sci-fi story with epic proportions that encompasses the history of the human race, and stakes just as big. It is a story that quickly escalates and one that needs to be told in full in order to see its brilliance.
Of course, the era of guaranteed second seasons for streaming shows is over, meaning "3 Body Problem" needs to accomplish what the previous Chinese adaptation did not and get renewed. That show was a near-verbatim adaptation, while Benioff and Weiss hope their more liberal take will prove haters wrong.
"During the first couple of seasons of 'Thrones,' a lot of people were like, 'Why didn't they put in this scene?' They wanted a literal adaptation of every single page," Benioff told The Hollywood Reporter. "I always wondered, 'Would people like that if they actually got it?' Now we have that with this, where there's one extremely faithful adaptation and then ours, which is less so, and others can judge how they stack up."
An issue of adaptation
That's the core issue with any adaptation — make it too similar and audiences have no reason to watch, but make it too different and the fans might hate it.
Benioff and Weiss hope that, if their take on "3 Body Problem" is successful and gets to tell the full story, it will somehow prove that you don't need to adapt things literally. The problem is that this is not really a good comparison between either this show and "Game of Thrones" or even between this and the previous adaptation. The Chinese TV adaptation was made with a much smaller budget and without the global reach of a platform like Netflix, so there's no way to compare their audience reception.
Meanwhile, the "Game of Thrones" seasons that audiences and critics disliked the most were not ones that deviated from the books, but ones that had no source material to fall back on. Whether or not we ever see George R. R. Martin release his version of the story's end, audiences still did not like the direction Benioff and Weiss took with the story once they had no more books to adapt.
As for "3 Body Problem," it remains to be seen whether it will be another big hit like early "Game of Thrones," or if it launches without any fanfare when it gets released on Netflix on March 21, 2024