The long and winding road from Game Of Thrones to 3 Body Problem
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who haven't penned a new TV episode since 2019, are back. So where have they been?
TV Features Game of Thrones
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’ long string of failures was once the stuff of legend. After they tanked Game Of Thrones’ ending (we guess the showrunners kind of forgot they owed their rabid fanbase a little bit of effort, if not a perfectly satisfying conclusion), fans—this writer admittedly included— reveled as every single one of the duo’s subsequent attempts to get a show to air continued to fall on the proverbial sword.
Episode one of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, which premieres March 21, is the first installment of a series penned by Benioff and Weiss (along with Alexander Woo) to make it onto a TV screen since 2019. And while getting any show over the finish line is an undeniable feat (and an increasingly rare one at that), both Game Of Thrones and 3 Body Problem are all about the shackles of history, and new viewers should know theirs. This is the song, if you will, of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.
Before Game Of Thrones
David Benioff began his writing career in earnest while penning a novel, The 25th Hour, for his master’s thesis at the University of California, Irvine. The novel would go on to become the 2002 Spike Lee-directed thriller of the same name starring Edward Norton. Benioff also found real success in his early years as the screenwriter for Troy (2004), Stay (2005), and The Kite Runner (2007).
But the tide started to turn for the promising screenwriter long before the iron throne was a mere glimmer in his eye. In 2004, Benioff was hired to write an initial script for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which he strived to give a darker tone than previous films in the franchise. It apparently didn’t work (although his screenplay is still floating around out there, and some fans say it’s better than what we eventually got). While Benioff is still credited as a writer on the project, Hitman’s Skip Woods was later brought in to revise his original work. In 2007, Benioff also signed on with Universal to pen a biopic of Kurt Cobain, but it never came to fruition.
But back to the beginning: Benioff met Weiss while studying in Dublin in 1995 and worked on a few just-for-fun scripts together over the years (including a pretty dope-sounding one about Satan working as the headmaster of a boarding school), but their first official collaboration, on a screenplay for an Ender’s Game adaptation in 2005, was never used. In 2006, Weiss announced that he was working on an adaptation of the Halo games for Peter Jackson, but that project also never saw the light of day.
After Game Of Thrones
We won’t re-litigate all of the backlash to Game Of Thrones’ final season here—we wouldn’t want to reopen any still-festering wounds—but a quick Google image search for the term “bad writers” or a glance at this 1.9 million-strong petition to “remake Game of Thrones Season 8 with competent writers” should get the job done pretty quickly. (To be fair, the duo’s show was pretty fantastic during its first four seasons.)
If none of that jogs your memory about just how much America hated these guys near the end of their run, a reminder of what was supposed to be their next project should. Remember Confederate? The two white writers’ “what if the South never lost the Civil War and slavery was still legal” fantasy? The one that was greenlit at HBO just six months after Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017? The ill-advised series thankfully never made it to air despite the fact that the network waited all the way until 2020 to officially cancel it, but the stain it left on the creators’ legacy will be hard to completely scrub out. “It’s kind of a low point,” Weiss said of the series in a January interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “You try things that feel like they are worth doing and some of them work out and some don’t.”
Their 2018 three-film Star Wars deal turned out to be yet another thing in the “didn’t work out” bucket, likely to the delight of all 25,000 people who signed on to yet another anti-Benioff and Weiss petition, this one titled “remove David Benioff and D.B. Weiss from working on any future Star Wars films.” The reasoning behind the duo’s split from Lucasfilm is slightly fuzzy, although the ethos behind the petition can’t have helped. The pair initially cited their historic, $200-plus million Netflix deal, claiming that “there are only so many hours in the day, and we felt we could not do justice to both Star Wars and our Netflix projects” (via Deadline) when the cancelation of their trilogy was announced just one year later. In their recent THR interview, however, the showrunners claimed that the breakup was actually instigated by Lucasfilm. To hear them tell it now, they were sketching out a film called The First Jedi that ended up not being the direction the studio wanted to take their IP.
But Benioff and Weiss are getting yet another shot at sci-fi with 3 Body Problem, the first show to come out of that massive deal. Will they finally break the curse and recapture some of that early GOT magic, or will the extraterrestrial series trigger another long winter for the duo? (For what it’s worth, my colleague Cindy White enjoyed their new show quite a bit.) Only time—and maybe a few more Change.org petitions—will tell.
19 Comments
“ fans—this writer admittedly included— reveled as every single one of the duo’s subsequent attempts to get a show to air continued to fall on the proverbial sword.”
This is so odd to me. They wrote a few unsatisfying episodes of a television show people were really invested in, and people take joy in them not continuing to work? I’m not suggesting you should feel pain or empathy for them (although would it hurt anyone to be a little more empathetic?) but devoting mental energy to celerbating their losses seems a little unhealthy.
This is probably me ignoring your very last sentence, but when they make comments like this I’m glad they’re stuck on the sinking ship that is AV Club.
I don’t get the B&W hate. The only really stupid move described in the article was the weird lost cause fantasy narrative which didn’t actually happen (thank God…)Although the end of GoT is legendarily bad the first four seasons (as reported even in this article) are awesome. I feel like 40-ish episodes of great TV outweigh 8 episodes of mediocre TV.
It will be fine if people stop being silly about them because the source material is coming from completed novels. And not from Martin who spends his time writing anything but the novels he needs to finish. I feel like not enough people blame Martin for not giving them the material the writers needed to make a quality show. The writers (and it seems cast) of Game of Thrones didn’t want to spend an extra 2-3 years to wrap it. They spent ten years on it already, they wanted to move on to other projects and characters. Maybe the writers should have just bowed out when they realized that Martin was that bad and let a new writing team wrap it up but the audience would have hated that too and we would hear non-stop whining about how the show changed after the new writers took over. *I read Game of Thrones in 1996. I wish people would wrap their head around that, it’s been 28 years since that was released. And the last novel in the series was published 13 years ago.
100% agree. Sure Benioff and Weiss rushed the ending, but I put the blame squarely on Martin for not at least giving them some idea of where everything was headed. GOT was the most expensive show on TV at the time, there was no way they could sustain that cast and the epic-sized production much longer before it started to become unprofitable. They had to end the show when they did. But Martin is 2 books behind at this point, it’s highly unlikely he even knows what the ending is, so the showrunners had to cobble SOMETHING together. It was pretty obvious from the first season that Dany was going to become the final boss (seriously, it’s telegraphed from the first episode, it shocked me that people got so mad about her heel turn at the end), so they just made their best guess as to what to do with the rest of the characters and wrapped it all up as best they could. The online hate they got was unjustified, and the vitriol from the fans should have been focused on Martin for not getting off his ass and actually finishing the damn books before the show caught up to him.
Martin gave them bullet points of where the series was going, which they subsequently raced through like a bad PowerPoint presentation. Note that they had already diverged from the books well before that, so it’s not like they could follow the books 1:1 anyway.
They knew the series was incomplete when they signed on, and they knew how long books 4 and 5 took to get written. There was no guarantee that the subsequent books were going to be written in time for them to adapt. If they can’t write a show without the author holding their hands, they shouldn’t have signed on in the first place. The problem wasn’t that they ran out of source material, it was that they ran out of interest in continuing to make the series.
The 25th Hour?
“Sheeiiiiiiiiittttttttttt.”
Fans suck, Part 893,682
Yeah, the D&D hate is the stuff of pathology, like an angry toddler lashing out at not getting a second cookie.
First, there’s the ridiculous idea that ANYONE on the show was clamoring to do more seasons after spending a DECADE on the whole thing. All were spent, all were done, all were wanting to move on. GRRMs inflammatory suggestion for half-a-dozen more seasons or poorly regurgitated material from Crows, Dragons and his unfinished stuff was more of a fever-dream wish than anything approaching anything realistic.
Second, the incessant harping about how ‘rushed’ the final season was. Only if you fell asleep at the wheel. Everything was blatantly spelled out and patiently set up, even painfully slow at times. I mean you had about half a dozen discussions on Dany’s sanity in the final season alone. People just chose to ignore it as they fully expected GOT to somehow stop being GOT and give them a nice little pat ending with John and Dany living happily ever after as absolute rulers of the realm with tons of cute babies, baby wolves and baby dragons.
DB Weiss is nobody, btw. He’s Benioff’s prop, it’s just an image thing. Benioff is a fraud; a handsome, charming guy from american royalty (wall street) who parlayed his incredible advantages into a horrific career that’s about to completely ruin yet another series of books I love. He won’t get another big show after 3body flops, but the damage has been done!
I don’t have any particular dog in this fight, but so far it seems its getting decent reviews. Not rapturous, but I’ve seen more positive than negative. Not sure how you measure it flopping on a platform we don’t get audience numbers for but critically it seems to be doing fine.
Rabid fans of the source material will always find an axe to grind. The Last of Us has been rightly hailed as the best ever screen adaptation of a video game, but there are still those who hate it, despite the fact that it was created by the very same people who created the original games.Another example is Apple’s Foundation series. While it’s not a great show, it’s not that bad either, but some fans of the books are still spitting bullets about the liberties the show takes with the source material. But the fact is, the first couple of books, written as episodic short stories and novellas that take place over hundreds of years (and not one female character in the first book), would have been impossible to adapt as a coherent and compelling series without a major overhaul. There’s also the fact that the best showrunners don’t want to be involved in slavish adaptations anyway. They like to bring something new to the table based on their own personal vision and interpretations of the source material. As a writer myself, I have had members of my critique group tell me they got things out of my writing I hadn’t even realized were in there. There’s more than one way to skin a cat!
Meh. I don’t hate or love these two. My main issue with them (if it can be called that) is their decision to take an existential threat years in the making (white walkers) and have the ensuing “war” between the white walkers and the unified kingdoms be a one-and-done affair, inside of 90 mins.That’s…not really how you do an army-versus-army siege!
That is one of the ideas Martin gave and will most likely be in the books (if he ever finishes them). He said in interviews that what he wishes Lord of Rings showed was what happened after the winning the epic battle. How different factions would come together and compromise once “peace” was won. He wants GoT to deal with that aspect of things.
The most jarring aspect of the final couple of seasons was that characters were suddenly popping up all over the place. Until that point, you always go a sense of the size and scale of Westeros, and that it took time and effort to get from A to B, which was put to good use plotwise. But the moment they put their foot on the accelerator, all that went out of the window.
Yep. Star Wars “final battle” syndrome, in which every major character can be any-fucking-where in the galaxy at a moment’s notice. Makes one wonder why they don’t ALWAYS just converge on a threat, en masse.
Eh.A number of us pointed out that GoT started going downhill long before Season 8, which by the beginning of that season the infamous horse meme hilariously illustrated in brutal form. It had gone from a show that relied on storytelling to one that relied on action sequences after S5, and once the former really deteriorated by S7 even those who’d only cared about dragons and sword fights started noticing. Could they have done better? Absolutely, and I’ve previously pointed out that among other mistakes, not expanding the writers room when they needed to come up with the last three seasons on their own was an act of pure hubris on their part.But it’s also really unfair to ignore that D&D also did one of the all time great editing jobs on the source material that was available for the first five seasons, which produced some of the best adapted television in memory. It’s now fairly obvious that’s their skillset rather than original writing – and in fairness, if the streaming era has shown us anything, editing and adapting are not particularly common talents for Hollywood.Despite their missteps, Three Body Problem as a series is something that they’re probably some of the best available talent out there to try to make a reasonable effort on, especially if this somehow gets to the third book. Rooting against them out of spite is a bit ridiculous.