Netflix renews both 3 Body Problem and its commitment to the Game Of Thrones guys

Netflix announced today that it’s renewing its sci-fi adaptation 3 Body Problem for a second season. The news serves not just a vote of confidence for the series, which stars Rosalind Chao, Benedict Wong, John Bradley, and many more as scientists and spies caught up in a planet-spanning tale of an oncoming alien invasion, but also series producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Who could probably use that little boost—which comes in the form of an extension to their very lucrative overall deal with the streamer—given how their post-Game Of Thrones careers were headed there for a minute there.

But despite “last season of Game Of Thrones” having pretty much entered the lexicon as shorthand for shitting the bed at the last minute—and the debacle surrounding the pair’s attempted follow-up, modern-era Civil War story Confederate, which was ultimately rejected by HBO—Benioff and Weiss appear to have regained some of that old swagger with 3 Body. (Which they co-created with Alexander Woo, working from the series of novels by Liu Cixin.) Streaming data is, as ever, unreliable, but Netflix is clearly happy enough with the show to keep bankrolling the expansive show.

Interestingly, the renewal order is actually a bit more open-ended than just “hey, have a second season”: Per THR, Benioff, Weiss, and Woo have apparently been given the green light to take the series to some kind of conclusion, although what that actually means in terms of practical episode orders or number of seasons is entirely unclear. They’re previously said they think they’d need roughly four seasons to cover the three books in Liu’s series, with the first season roughly mapping on to the first book, published back in 2008. Benioff has previously expressed his strong desire to get into the back half of the show, noting that of Liu’s books, the “second book is far better than the first, and the third book just completely blew my mind.”