Netflix finally comes out and says 3 Body Problem will be a 3 Season Show
The streamer has now clarified its previous commitment to finishing the story David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are telling
A couple of weeks back, Netflix released some slightly weirdly worded news, announcing that it’s sci-fi adaptation 3 Body Problem had been renewed—not for a specific run of episodes or seasons, but until series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss could finish the story they were telling. (Adapted from Liu Cixin’s best-selling trilogy of novels, which track humanity as it gets in really over its head in a dark and hostile universe.) Which was nice and all—nobody likes making the temporal and emotional commitment required to really lose yourself in a TV show, especially one with as many moving parts as 3 Body Problem, only to have the thing get yanked away before it’s done—but a little ambiguous in terms of how much actual TV show fans could expect.
Said ambiguity has now been cleared up, as Netflix confirmed during its Emmys-focused “FYSEE” event—the name took us a second, until we realized it was a fairly annoying play on “For Your Consideration/FYC”—on Friday. The streamer confirmed that 3 Body Problem will run for three seasons, with each season, presumably, mapping on to one of Liu’s books. The show has already gone out of its way to seed some of this stuff in its first season, though, including introducing the central conceit of the second novel, The Dark Forest: The idea that, given that humanity is facing a potentially genocidal opponent capable of detecting any spoken, written, or electronic communication on the planet, the only way to fend off the oncoming threat is to entrust Earth’s survival to a handful of strategists who keep their plans for saving the planet entirely in their own brains.
Heady, conceptual stuff (with just enough of an “intergalactic espionage” element to keep the adrenaline up), and, given how well the show’s first season did, something we’re pretty excited to see hit the screens in this new version. (Meanwhile, it’s also nice to know that Benioff and Weiss, who are still working off the massive reputational onus they developed with the ending they generated for their breakout hit Game Of Thrones, are still operating under some pretty tightly defined limits.)