3 Body Problem Is the Consequence of a Post-Game of Thrones TV Landscape

There is a universal truth of the current state of television: Game of Thrones changed everything. The HBO series premiered in 2011 to a very different TV landscape. While expensive TV had been attempted before—especially at HBO, who paid record-breaking bills for series like Rome and Band of Brothers—there was nothing that had reached the same scale of expense and success before. Television, long the medium of small budgets and succinct ideas, was now open to the blockbuster model.

After such a smash success, it felt like series co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss could do anything they wanted. But as the HBO series neared its close, many possible projects came and went. The two were hired to write a series of Star Wars films for Disney. And then there was the heavily criticized Confederate, the alternate history “slavery is legal in the South” series that was in development at HBO for two years. But five years after Game of Thrones ended, Benioff and Weiss have finally released a major new project after signing a deal with Netflix: an adaptation of the Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem.

For the first time, Benioff and Weiss are writing TV in the landscape they caused. Expensive TV isn’t a rarity, it’s the norm. Disney+ franchise offerings like Wandavision and The Mandalorian can cost over $25 million per episode. Amazon put $1 billion dollars into developing The Rings of Power and $50 million per episode for the spy series Citadel, a real show that people definitely watched. And even a series that started at a not-too-insanely-expensive price tag like Stranger Things ballooned to a budget of $30 million an episode for Season 4.

So enter 3 Body Problem, an eight-episode series that cost $20 million an episode, even more than Game of Thrones. The series positions itself as a grand sci-fi epic; a story of ordinary scientists wrestling with time, destiny, and the meaning of discovery. It’s a series rich in theming (surprisingly so for writers who previously said themes were for “eighth grade book reports”).

It’s disappointing then that 3 Body Problem uses its budget to switch its setting between a highly advanced virtual reality world and… meetings rooms, living rooms, science labs, and interrogation rooms. Even the virtual reality world’s design has that slight gumminess to its CGI that’s common in blandly lit projects built in post-production. The argument can’t even be made that it’s trying to simulate the uncanny valley look of actual virtual reality since the technology is supposed to be highly advanced in the series’ world. It might be acceptable on a laptop screen, but once you realize Season 1 had almost the same budget as Dune (2021), it’s a little disappointing.

Benioff and Weiss’s desire to adapt The Three-Body Problem is obvious. The series is incredibly rich and filled with weighty ideas in the same vein as Game of Thrones. But Game of Thrones was a fantasy spectacle. 3 Body Problem has some strong set pieces, but it’s most interesting when it’s thinking about what its story means. It’s the type of storytelling that works better in a novel that you can take your time with and ponder with the characters. It also doesn’t help that the characters in the Netflix series are incredibly thin, often relegated to dialogue that leans either too far into just talking about the ideas of the show or just plain exposition. 

3 Body Problem isn’t bad TV. The pacing is pretty strong for an eight-episode series. There’s enough questions and twists to keep viewers entertained. But it feels disappointingly a product of its time. A show made from the scraps of ideas that Game of Thrones put in every screenwriter and TV development executive’s head: that good series are expensive shows based on intellectual property, with large casts and seasons with 10 episodes or less.