Beware: Game Of Thrones‘ co-creators return with The 3 Body Problem trailer
Netflix's upcoming sci-fi TV show from David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will premiere early next year
TV News Game of Thrones
Four years after Game Of Thrones’ end, we finally have a first glimpse into what co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have been cooking up since then. The duo, along with Alexander Woo, spearheads The 3 Body Problem, an epic sci-fi drama based on Liu Cixin’s novel of the same name. Netflix finally dropped the show’s first trailer and release date, which will arrive in early 2024.
The 3 Body Problem follows a young woman’s fateful decision in ‘60s China that reverberates across space and time, including affecting brilliant scientists in the present day. As the laws of nature unravel before their eyes, five former colleagues reunite to confront the greatest threat in humanity’s history. It sounds simple enough; nothing like navigating complex Westerosi politics and power games for a throne, a story that Benioff and Weiss wrapped without any issues whatsoever. (We kid, of course).
At least the trailer for The 3 Body Problem looks exciting, with people looking into the existence of the extraterrestrial. “Anything might be out there. The unknown troubles us,” a voiceover creepily narrates in the footage. And he’s not wrong. The visuals look stunning, promising to transport from the past to the present to potentially outer space. It helps that the cast is equally enticing. The 3 Body Problem ensemble includes Benedict Wong, Rosalind Chao, Eiza González, Jovan Adepo, Saamer Usmani, Jess Hong, Jason Forbes, and GOT alums John Bradley and Jonathan Pryce.
However, take the teaser and the stars with a grain of salt. It’s because The 3 Body Problem could land anywhere on the spectrum between Game Of Thrones season three or season eight, creative quality-wise. Let’s not forget that Benioff and Weiss have exited projects over the years, like their Star Wars show, or their canceled Confederate HBO series. They aren’t involved with the prequel series House Of The Dragon either, which is probably for the best.
Hopefully, The 3 Body Problem will be enough to save their brand—Lord knows they need it—while providing an immersive viewing experience. The eight-episode first season will premiere on Netflix in January 2024.
85 Comments
Im pretty sympathetic to these guys. I’m sure when they signed up for Game of Thrones they were assured the novels would be done before the show. So while they did oversee some weak shit, it wasn’t really their fault.
Plus, they’ll always have a special place in my heart for writing a pretty good Sunny episode, and being in the waterslide ep.
https://itsalwayssunny.fandom.com/wiki/Flowers_for_CharlieSuch a good episode lol
Yeah, but ‘Confederate’…
Some people seemed to think The Man in the High Castle was somehow less “problematic” than Confederate would’ve been, but I still don’t buy it.
What about Confederate? It’s a show we never saw, or even got a partial glimpse of, so it seems strange to count it as evidence of something about Weiss and Benioff.
Wasn’t as bad of an idea as the butt hurt idiots on the internet think. Alternate “what if the bad guys one” stories are common. No one was bitching about “The Man in the High Castle” show. For some reason people assumed the show would somehow be pro-confederate and racism which seems like a silly assumption
Fucking thank you. That show made a passing reference to “the enslavement of the African continent” and no one said a word. Because it was about hating the end of GOT and not a single fucking thing for any black person.
Confederate was announced in 2017 and the backlash was immediate.
Have you listened to these guys talk about, well, anything? These guys are literally the last people you’d want trying to make a show where chattel slavery still exists in half of the country. They are devoid of nuance or insight. That shit would’ve been a disaster.
Taking your word for it that that is true, it still seems weird to assume their intentions were bad and so they are unsypmathetic.
I watched enough GoT to know that if Benioff and Weiss can make a sex scene assaultive or exploitative, that’s how they’re going to play it.
That’s entirely possible but sight unseen I think people were coming down on it far harder then other similar ideas.
I mean, they already wrote a show about chattel slavery. It was called Game of Thrones, and the majority of people didn’t complain about it until the last season. There’s nothing to suggest that they a) wouldn’t have had additional writers including people of color and b) that it wouldn’t have involved trying to end slavery (just like Game of Thrones).
“These guys are literally the last people you’d want trying to make a show where chattel slavery still exists in half of the country.”
What makes you think that slavery would still exist 220+ years after the Civil War? It was literally on its way out when the war happened.
But HEY, if you had to think about it for more than a second you couldn’t mindlessly bitch about the show that you know NOTHING about.
I had something much, much longer, written, but I’ll condense it as to why I don’t think Confederate, if made, would’ve worked from a narrative standpoint.
1. Assuming that chattel slavery would still be a thing, it isn’t self-sufficient, requires constant slave trade, and the reality of the world by the Civil War is that chattel slavery and the slave trade was a sheer no-go. France and the UK, our closest allies at the time, had both gotten rid of slavery and the slave trade, so it’s unlikely that any Confederate nation that maintained it in any form would’ve been eradicated long before the modern day. Or, at best, they’d never grow to a nation of international prominence, thus raising the narrative question of why focus on an alternate history for a minor nation whose only international renown is the infamy of being a slave state in the modern day?
2. Jumping from point one, if you write the narrative such that chattel slavery isn’t a thing, then the central conceit of the show and the necessity of the alternate history is extirpated. A narrative about a nation that formerly had chattel slavery but now doesn’t yet is still vaguely racist is a show that doesn’t need an alternate history.
3. The intervening period between the Civil War and modern day is so long, it would require so many global-scale changes that it would preempt much of the plausability before it got off the ground. This is one of the reasons why alternate histories either stay relatively near the chronological diversion point (for example, The Man in the High Castle begins in 1962, a mere 16 years after the in-universe end of WWII), or are far enough in the future where you can add fantastical elements and explain them away by the immensity of the time frame. With over 150 years between the end of the Civil War and modern day, it’s both too close and too far from the diversion point to avoid the pitfalls that would inevitably occur (either going too fantastical and breaking the audiences suspension of disbelief, or veering too closely to historical contexts and ending up with a narrative that doesn’t function due to the implausibilities that arise if you accept certain historical in-universe realities)
4. The relative power disparaties between a victorious Confederate nation and the people in subjugates is so vast that you’d lose the audience because the likelyhood of the subjugated people being victorious is too remote. However, if the relative power levels between the sides are too close, it raises the question of why is there still slavery? If there’s no slavery, then as I said in point #2, why have the alternate history in the first place?
5. Weiss and Benioff have shown, with GoT, that they’re not good at writing themselves out of narrative corners they’ve put themselves in. To get to point B from point A, there are going to be certain narrative decisions that must be made. However, if you’re good (or at the very least, you think it out ahead of time), you can make the necessary decisions satisfying. For example, Weiss and Benioff were in a major narrative corner in GoT, because they had to contend with the dual facts that the Night King was both the most powerful single entity in the narrative (who got increasingly more powerful as time went on, including a zombie dragon), but he also had to lose. The simplest way to have him lose in a both narratively and audience satisfying way isn’t a matter of who killed him, but when he was killed. Having the battle be the or at least near the actual finale of the story would’ve been the proper decision, as even though it was not the central conflict of the show (Dany returning to Westeros and attempting to reclaim the Iron Throne was), it was the most significant conflict of the show (who cares who sits on the Iron Thrones if you’re all turned into wights?)
Wow that was the short response!My point was not the show would have been good or not. Just that I think the reaction was and still continues to be over-reactionary for something no one has scene or even read a script of. It probably would have been bad for a number of reasons but we just will never know.
You should’ve seen the two I edited out. Found myself theory-crafting a more suitable end to GoT hahaNevertheless, I do understand your point. The optics were just bad all around. Also, Weiss, Benioff, and HBO didn’t do a good job of the rollout. When you have a show with a premise like that, trotting out two white guys who lost a great deal of storytelling goodwill only recently isn’t the right move, especially when the other two executive producers were black.
I dunno, GMcFF—maybe you should turn your longer response into a short eBook and sell it on Amazon. I’d read it….I think what bothered me about CONFEDERACY was that it was originally announced with Benioff, Weiss, and Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman, the two Black Executive Producers who were originally announced as co-Executive Producers and co-writers. A couple weeks later the Spellmans left the project, though Benioff and Weiss were seemingly gung-ho to continue…then a few weeks after that, HBO put the project on indefinite hold.
I think it was the right reaction. There were numerous sex scenes in Game of Thrones that were severely mishandled, and there was little reason to think Benioff and Weiss would be better at handling race. Black Lives Matter was going strong at the time, and questions of who should tell who’s story were in the public consciousness. Trump’s presidency was revealing Nazis, racists, and Confederate sympathizers were still a going concern. It was the wrong time for two white guys to do a What-if-the-Confederates-won show, especially these particular ones.
“There were numerous sex scenes in Game of Thrones that were severely mishandled, and there was little reason to think Benioff and Weiss would be better at handling race.”
What a moronic take.
Weiss and Benioff have shown, with GoT, that they’re not good at writing themselves out of narrative corners they’ve put themselves in. But also corners GRRM put them into.I don’t know that you can judge their world building, their character motivations or their narrative choices solely by GOT because you have an incomplete book series behind it.That could still mean Confederate would be crap, but GRRM bears some responsibility for not finishing the books, putting characters in circumstances and then Benioff and Weiss having to be like “So now we have to move it forward…” Maybe they would have never put the characters in those places. Maybe they would have foreshadowed things differently. Maybe they would have excised huge plot points. But they kept being told they would be important when Winds of Winter came out.
This is very true.
However, I don’t think we know the scope, contract-wise, about either the degree of input that GRRM has, and more importantly, whatever potential veto power he has over narrative decisions made that Weiss, Benioff, or higher-ups at HBO. So while he bears some responsibility, given the changes to the story that were made even when they were adapting from the books, it seems more clear that the contractural relationship wasn’t nearly as GRRM-heavy as say E.L. James when it came to Fifty Shades of Grey, or J.K. Rowling when it comes to anything related to Harry Potter (where both of them retained a great deal of creative control).
It’s also a potential reality that GRRM began to lose leverage as the series both moved away from adapting the completed books and became more popular. I can’t imagine that HBO would greenlight a series of the expense of GoT and leave themselves entirely dependent on the author of the books completing them by the end of the series, so there had to have been a contractural stipulation that the series would continue in spite of him not completing the books or (heaven-forbid) he’s rendered unable to complete them.
It’s also a weird circumstance for GRRM (or any author) to be thrown into. You’re now not only writing the continuation of a series in novel-form, but you also have to consider the realities of what will potentially be adapted into the TV series. Your creative loyalities might be split between what’s best for the book(s) or what’s best for the TV series (or movie, etc).
It was certaintly a mess all-around, but I’d personally put more responsibility at the feet of Weiss and Benioff (especially in seasons 7 and 8).
GRRM has enough TV experience that I do think he understood a fair number of implications. I think the lesson is honestly – don’t adapt a complex book series where the books aren’t finished in all honesty. I truly think several characters and plot lines would have been excised in a world where they knew the books weren’t going to be finished.
If there’s no slavery, then as I said in point #2, why have the alternate history in the first place?There are many works of alt-history (Harry Turtledove’s for example) that have an independent Confederacy in the modern era that don’t have slavery continuing to the time of the story. Slavery was dying out all over the world. Even Brazil got rid of it in the 1880s. But there are a lot of other interesting questions to address — for example, what happens in WWI if there there are two enemy American countries? Probably one would side with Britain and the other Germany, for example.
True, but if the foundational difference between a Confederate America versus a Union America is slavery, and you remove that, what’s the impetus for the nations to remain independent of one another? There aren’t so significant of differences between the two potential nations to keep them at loggerheads unless you have slavery or a very significant racial/racist ideology that foments and maintains the separation. The sociocultural differences aren’t vast enough to do it themselves, there wouldn’t be a long-standing history of independence from one another, and outside of foreign intervention to stoke the flames (which, while interesting, is limited because of the relative isolation of the US from other major powers, unlike many other once united but then divided nations), I just don’t see a compelling story that doesn’t come across as so fanciful as to make using the US Civil War as the diversion point of history an odd choice.
To your point about WWI, I don’t see any historical precedent, even in alternate history, that would warrant a two-nation America going to war with one another, or supporting opposite sides of the conflict. We didn’t fully enter the war until 1917, and knowing just a bit about the nature of the conflict and the events that precipitated it, the notion that there’d be either a diplomatic, economic, or military impetus for a divided United States to not only enter the conflict, but be on opposing sides, strikes me as a bit too far fetched. It also requires one of the issues I pointed it that I don’t think Weiss and Benioff would’ve been able to pull off successfully, and that’s having a scope so grand that it would be both explained and plausible in-universe for that occurrence to happen. You could perhaps say that poor diplomacy led to each nation signing a mutual defense treaty at some point prior to the turn of the 20th century that they simply forgot about come-1914, but if the alternate history rests on the continued idiocy of a small group of admittedly powerful people, once again, it doesn’t necessitate alternate history to begin with (or more specifically, having the Civil War be the diversion point).
In short, using the Civil War as the diversion point for an alternate history just isn’t that interesting (at least compared to others) because unlike many of the other alternate histories, we have a good sense of what would’ve happened had the Confederacy been successful: the eventual elimination of slavery but the continued legal implementation of racist policies. That actually happened with the failure of Reconstruction and Plessy v. Ferguson, amongst others. It’s not an interesting “what if”, because we essentially saw that what-if outcome play out, only with an earlier elimination of the foundation issue that separated the Union and Confederacy (that being slavery).
True, but if the foundational difference between a Confederate America versus a Union America is slavery, and you remove that, what’s the impetus for the nations to remain independent of one another?
I think you need to look around the world. There are a lot of countries that really don’t have “a reason” to exist anymore but still do because once created, they tend to continue to exist by inertia. Look at the Middle East and Africa — many of the countries there make no sense and cut across ethnic and religious differences leading to internal strife, but they exist because they were created during colonialism and the borders stayed even post-colonialism. And the same thing for many former Soviet Republics — Moldova really ought to rejoin Romania but is its own country because Stalin wanted part of Romania in the USSR and so Moldova became its own thing when the USSR broke up.
In short, using the Civil War as the diversion point for an alternate history just isn’t that interesting
Have you read many (or any) such alternate histories, though? I’d recommend Ward Moore’s “Bring the Jubilee” (1953). It’s considered in many ways to be the foundational alternate history novel (although even the Romans wondered about what would have happened if Carthage won) and for example PKD cited it as the inspiration for “The Man in the High Castle”.
“In short, using the Civil War as the diversion point for an alternate history just isn’t that interesting”
That is ridiculous. The Civil War is the point at which the entirety of American history could change. The idea that there could be two (OR MORE!) Americas that are vastly different from one another politically isn’t interesting?
I can’t come to any rationalization that would support such a conclusion.
Christ, the Americas in 2023 could be warring countries, a la what goes on in the Middle East, or the Russia/Ukraine war.
Without the USA around, what happens with Russia (the USSR)? What do the Americas do during WWI. During WWII?
What is the world like without the USA as a superpower?
If you think the Civil War as the diversion point or an alternate history just isn’t that interesting, you might need to upgrade your imagination.
“Probably one would side with Britain and the other Germany, for example.”
Probably?
“A narrative about a nation that formerly had chattel slavery but now doesn’t yet is still vaguely racist is a show that doesn’t need an alternate history.”
I mean, whether the South continues slavery or not, this would *STILL* be an alternate history in which there is not just a “United States of America”, but also a Confederate States of America.
Maybe slavery does still exist in the CSA in the show and maybe it doesn’t, Maybe in the year 2023 the CSA slave trade ended in the 1960s and that country is still dealing with the aftermath of it.
Slavery wasn’t the only difference between the North and the South.
It also feels like a concept that really isn’t entirely new and versions of it exist out in the world (to varying degrees of success). I don’t know that it is the best time to be thinking about “What if the Confederacy won?” because we live in a hellscape of a real world full of racists and neo Nazis, but the reaction was extreme.
Remind me? Or I guess maybe it has a wikipedia article. I will look. Edit: I dunno, it doesn’t seem that bad? I don’t recall anyone accusing The Man in the High Castle of being “nazi fan fiction.” I can understand the aprehension but personally I would have waited to see the pilot before passing judgment.
I never understood why a series about the nazis having won the was is fine but one about the Confederacy having won is not.
Nazi culture is not celebrated anywhere these days, in Germany or elsewhere. Confederate culture still is across much of the American South.That’s the difference.
“Yeah, but ‘Confederate’…
“Yeah, but” that thing you know nothing about?
Yeah, but that thing…
Also, the biggest weakness of the conclusion of Game of Thrones was the part decided my Martin — than Bran, the show’s least interesting character, should be king, despite it making no fucking sense at all.
He had the best story! How do you choose a king?!Yeah no that was pretty dumb, I suspect if he were to finish the books Martin would have made it make sense.
No one who watched Game of Thrones and thought, “Oh God, they’ve cut to another scene of Bran wandering around in the fucking cold,” thought Bran had the best story.
You missunderstand me, possibly because I haven’t watched the finale since it aired and might be remembering wrong. But wasn’t that Tyrion’s reasoning for nominating him as king? “He has the best story?”
I remembered, and wasn’t disagreeing with you. It was a real dumb explanation. And like, Sansa had a pretty good story to rule. And Jon. And lots of other people. Like, even as a contrived way to get to a preconceived result, it made no sense.
I suspect the reason Martin hasn’t finished the books is because he has no fucking clue how to make it make sense either. The difference is, he doesn’t have a contractual obligation to actually produce an ending, so he can just procrastinate indefinitely and let Benioff and Weiss be the fall guys.
Well, we’ll probably never know whether Martin’s version of that story would’ve made sense, since he’s almost certainly never going to get around to finishing the series. But I don’t think King Bran was an inherently unworkable idea, and since Benioff and Weiss apparently knew for quite a while that the series was going to end up there, they could’ve done a lot more than they did to lay the groundwork.At the very least, they could’ve not done the two egregiously stupid things they did do with Bran, which were to a) hide him off-screen for an entire season, and then b) turn the previously soulful character into a creepy exposition robot. It’s almost impressively wrong-headed, to prepare the audience for Bran’s fate by going out of the way to make him seem disposable and off-putting.
I’d also make the argument that some Bran stuff suffers from the normal TV issue of “child grows up faster than he should and not all child actors grow up to be strong adult actors.” Bran’s flatness was clearly written, but I don’t know that the actor was fully up for the nuance of the performance either. If he had been an actor capable of doing what Max Von Sydow did as the Three Eyed Raven creepy and soulful exposition machine may have read differently.
I can certainly imagine a more seasoned actor doing a better job with the material, but the writers knew that they didn’t have a seasoned actor but a kid who had been cast as Bran in his first on screen role at the age of nine and had been playing the role one particular way for the better part of a decade. They should’ve known they were courting disaster by suddenly asking him to play the role completely differently after all that time.
Sure, but then you also have the fact that from the outline some of the Three Eyed Raven stuff was always in the cards. That’s the gamble you take with kid roles. I’m not blaming the actor inherently, but I do think the material may have hit differently if books and tv shows had the same control over how someone is seen to be behaving.
If you think Bran’s gonna be King at the end of the books, I have some Theranos stock you might want to buy.
It wasn’t their fault that the show outran the source material, but the crap of the last few seasons sure was.
Yeah, I’m not even saying they’re good writers. I just have sympathy because I suspsect they signed up to adapt a story and then got stuck ending it.
I have sympathy for that aspect of the situation (like, it’s clearly not a good situation to be in), but no sympathy for the fact that they subsequently shit the bed. They’re professional showrunners, they should either know how to write good drama or know how to hire people who do.
Yeah, that’s totally fair and I think most of us agree they gave exponentially fewer fucks during the final season.
“They’re professional showrunners, they should either know how to write good drama or know how to hire people who do.”
So, you’ve never encountered something that was poorly written, that someone was paid to write?
Yeah, I don’t know why people treat GRRM’s story points as some irreplaceable resource. If he didn’t give them enough details about how the story was supposed go, the writers on the show should’ve just made up their own details like the writers on any other show.And it’s not like the show’s writers were using as much of GRRM’s precious story material as they could. They were jettisoning known plot points from the books left in right in favor of simpler, dumber storylines. How many plotlines in the last few years were reduced to the dirt-stupid notion that if you kill the leader, you get to be the leader, even though a central premise of the series is that lordly succession doesn’t work that way? How many complex character arcs were replaced by a directionless back-and-forth, like Arya pinging between “I am no one” and “I’ll always be a Stark” or Jaime between “I can be a better man” and “I’ll always be Cersei’s,” until they randomly land on one or the other when the music stops?
Given how badly Benioff and Weiss handled the storylines they did know about, I don’t have a lot of faith that they would’ve done better if they’d known more.
No. No. It was their fault. They were the ones who wanted the short final seasons. They could have easily passed the show runner duties to Brian Cogman who absolutely loved the material. But no, they wanted to finish -their- show and rushed the conclusion. Fuck them.
They could have easily passed the show runner duties to Brian CogmanFor starters, are you sure this is even true? Contracts exist. I don’t know what the deal was but it’s not inconcievable that they’d signed on for multiple seaons years before.Anyway “This other person could have done a better job” is a pretty weak criticism of someone’s work. I always assumed they rushed it becuase after a decade they just wanted to be fucking done with it already. Again, can’t blame them.
No. I don’t know that for a fact. But considering HBO wanted more episodes I highly doubt they would have cared about adjusting contracts – or anything else – to make it happen.As for Cogman doing it better – could it have been worse? Plus he is responsible for season 2 of episode 8, the only one people remember fondly.“HBO would have been happy for the show to keep going, to have more episodes in the final season. We always believed it was about 73 hours, and it will be roughly that. As much as they wanted more, they understood that this is where the story ends.”https://ew.com/tv/2019/04/09/game-of-thrones-season-8-showrunners-interview/
No. I don’t know that for a fact. But considering HBO wanted more episodes I highly doubt they would have cared about adjusting contracts – or anything else – to make it happen.I have no idea how these contracts might work. Maybe Fraiser Crane (the poster not the fictional character) might chime in he’s an entertainment lawyer I think. But it’s kind of nuts to expect anyone being paid to do a thing to go to their boss and say “can we get out of our contract, this guy can do it better.” I could totally see HBO enforcing the contract because they want the two people who made the show such a success. could it have been worse?…of course? I forget which producer it was who at one point had the rights to spider-man and didn’t know the character and wanted to make a movie where he was like a were-spider. It can always get worse.
I know enough about contracts (or at least I think I do) to know that the parties can always mutually agree to cancel them at any time; it’s not possible to sign a contract all parties are locked into with no way out. If a contract contains language that says “this contract may not be terminated early, even by mutual assent of all involved parties,” there’s no way to enforce that language: the people who could file suit all just signed another contract saying that the old contract is void.
So if B&W and HBO mutually agreed to cancel the existing contract (or, more likely, modify it) so that someone else could take over the duties, they certainly could have done so. Whether they would want to is another story, but since HBO evidently couldn’t force them to do 10 episodes in seasons 6 and 7, it might well have been better to have them step back into advisory roles and let Cogman (or whoever) take the reins (…of Castamere).
First, thanks for the considered reply! but I was envisioning something more like D&D were on board but HBO was not. I wasn’t trying to say the thing you’re describing.
“Whether they would want to is another story, but since HBO evidently couldn’t force them to do 10 episodes in seasons 6 and 7”You know less about TV than you do about contracts.
HBO could VERY EASILY decided to do two 10-episode seasons. B&W did not force them, that is now how being a showrunner works. If HBO wanted longer seasons as badly as you incorrectly think they did, they could’ve fired/replaced B&W at *literally* any time.
Allegedly, they told HBO that they weren’t willing to do additional seasons/episodes, but I don’t think that would have stopped HBO from replacing them at the end of their contracts so it’s shared responsibility.But let’s also not give GRRM a pass on choosing not to finish the books. The show writers ultimately had to work with what they had.
“But considering HBO wanted more episodes I highly doubt they would have cared about adjusting contracts – or anything else – to make it happen.”
You “highly doubt” they wouldn’t do something that they LITERALLY DID NOT DO?
Was the number of female characters brutalized and raped their fault? Were the gratuitous nude scenes their fault?
“So while they wrote, directed and produced some weak shit, it wasn’t really their fault.”Fixed.
Yeah but that’s saying they couldn’t write anything good without someone else’s material. Plus, I don’t feel like cutting them much slack given that it seemed to me, with some hearsay to back it up, that they basically got tired of the show and rushed to the conclusion. While it’s no guarantee, if they took the time to do the work and make Daenerys’ crazy turn take a longer time and make more sense, maybe it could’ve improved things.
Yeah, but like I said in one of these posts they came on to do a job that shouldn’t have required writing the story. It was supposed to be an adaptation. That they may be shitty writers doesn’t make them unsympathetic, in my mind. They didn’t sign up to do that job.
That definitely put them an a rough position, but it’s still okay to criticize what they came up with themselves. And again, I think they COULD have made that ending work if they earned it, and hadn’t turned down making the season longer. At least, that’s what I had heard happened.
By all accounts, it was also their call to blow through the last two seasons in 13 episodes rather than full seasons. I don’t begrudge them wanting to move on after living in that world for close to ten years, but my sympathy ends when they chose to rush through the ending instead of handing off the reins so they could do the things they wanted to do instead.
They were cocky enough to tell HBO they can finish the 7th season in 7 episodes and final season in 6 (!) episodes. HBO was willing to offer them more. They changed the entire process in those last two seasons. They ran out of talent when it came to them to write the final two seasons.They also lost the Star Wars project.I don’t feel for them. They got cocky.Don’t get cocky kid.
Yeah, they made mistakes and some shitty calls. It’s not like I’m saying I want to hire them to oversee a TV show. I just think they shouldered most of the blame for the crappy final seasons somewhat unfairly. Blame Martin. Also do we know that they didn’t lose the Star Wars project because of the backlash to GoT?
It was a collective failure for sure. Still, I will be extremely skeptical in anything the “Double D’s” are tied to. I am guessing the backlash from GoT didn’t help the Star Wars project. Showbiz is tough. George R R Martin is not clean from this whole GoT mess. He pisses me off as well. I am glad I didn’t start reading the books. I don’t think they will ever get finished. He is now being protected by the success of HOTD.
I agree, but I also don’t. They didn’t have to rush through the last few seasons of GoT like they did. I didn’t hate the storylines, I hated that it was all so rushed.
In the photo above they remind me of a couple writers/comedians that would appear for bits on Conan O’Brien’s old show.
The duo, along with Alexander Woo, spearheadsFor multiple people, it’s “spearhead” without the ‘s’ at the end.
Doctors Who and the Spearheads from Space
“Duo” is a collective noun, which usually takes a singular verb but can take a plural verb, depending on the action in the sentence. In the sentence, the duo is acting as a unit, so the singular is correct.
Hong Kong Danger Duo forever!
I have very low hopes from that trailer. Of course, a trailer is always going to push the more “actiony” parts, but I can’t even remember where those parts are even in the novels. Probably in the game? There is certainly intrigue, politics and some violence in the books, but they are mostly philosophical pining about physics and its implications on reality and the human condition, from a very Chinese citizen perspective. It’s really good, particularly the first book, which uses the different places in time the narrative jumps around to to great effect. It is though, a lot of people just thinking and talking. It’s not any easy adaption. Good luck if they try to extend into the second and third book.
Pretty sure a lot of those shots are from the game, yeah.from a very Chinese citizen perspective.This. So… I think the parts of the novels that frustrated me the most were the times where they project a very provincial Chinese mentality onto humankind in general, without realizing that the rest of the world doesn’t see it that way. It’s a problem that feels somewhat chronic in Chinese storytelling (speaking from experience).I think the worst example is Wade(?), in the third book. He’s meant to be menacing and authoritative, but acts in a way that would just make him seem deranged and unfit for leadership in any other locale. He’s supposed to be American, but he’s 100% a Chinese archetype.
Having read the 3 Body Problem trilogy fairly recently, I’m not sure how this is gonna go. Could be great, could be terrible. Doubly so given D&D’s involvement.
The novels, in my opinion, are a mixture of some genuinely cool, unique and awesome sci-fi ideas, and some really cool subplots, strung together with some absolutely terrible storytelling and characterization. They’re about 50% awesome and 50% dogshit, with little in between. They’re also pretty sexist and promote a worldview that is at once cynical, regressive, provincial and kinda dumb, all at the same time. I sort of hate that they’re so lauded, even if I get why they are so, because some of the stuff in there is genuinely really cool and interesting.So I feel like this is either right up D&D’s alley or their issues are gonna compound. We’ll see I guess.
Alexander Woo is co-writing with them and I will say this is very much up his alley to deal with and extrapolate on. The Terror Season 2 wasn’t my cup of tea, but I can see him dealing with a lot of those themes here.
Fair enough, can’t say I’m familiar with his work but hopefully he can identify where to make the right changes.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who was a little flummoxed about the books being portrayed as incredible science fiction. I didn’t dislike them, and I do tend to have trouble getting immersed in translated works anyway, but it still didn’t really seem like there was much there.
The film looks a lot more engaging, to be honest.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who was a little flummoxed about the books being portrayed as incredible science fiction.I know what you mean. I think that’s kind of it, though – they are pretty incredible as science fiction (in the sense that there are a lot of cool sci-fi/physics-related ideas), so if that’s literally all you’re looking for I guess I can kinda see how you’d like them. But as stories with plots, characters, themes etc they’re incredibly patchy. And sociologically his ideas are ass.
and I do tend to have trouble getting immersed in translated works anyway
As someone who’s done work translating Mandarin, there are times when you need some poetic license to not make it sound really clunky in English (and probably in other languages as well). And there are times in the books where they clearly didn’t do that. I have heard people say they read better in Mandarin, but yeah, that doesn’t really fix the problems with the story so I’m not sure how much of a difference it would make.
I’ve read some of Ken Liu’s own work, who translated the first and third books of the series into English, so it’s not like they were translated by someone who doesn’t know how a speculative fiction novel goes together.
If their names weren’t attached, would this look like a dozen other big sci-fi shows trying to get attention?