Why there's a reason to be hopeful for the Game of Thrones creators' The Three-Body Problem Netflix series

Vanity Fair

"After all the false starts of the last few years, fans may be understandably skeptical about the chances of this project actually coming to fruition," Joanna Robinson says of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as they begin their TV adaptation of Liu Cixin's sci-fi trilogy along with Alexander Woo. "But Netflix’s Three-Body Problem announcement also contains a few details that may give hope to anyone wishing they could recapture that old Thrones feeling. It may seem a little inside baseball to subject a press release to a close reading—but after HBO openly admitted that Confederate’s messy P.R. rollout contributed to that project’s dissolution, it’s hard not to read Netflix’s announcement as a clearly workshopped attempt to get things right this time. HBO’s much-maligned Confederate release drew criticism for spotlighting Weiss and Benioff, but burying the news that two Black creators—Malcolm Spellman and Nichelle Tramble Spellman—would also be working on the show. Netflix, however, made a point of emphasizing that Chinese-American producer Alexander Woo—who most recently ran The Terror: Infamy, a series centered on Japanese internment camps in the U.S.—is the third lead creative on the Three-Body Problem project. Netflix has also hired author Liu Cixin, who wrote the show’s China-set source material, as a consulting producer. The streamer included his blessing of the project in its release. Chinese-American writer Ken Liu—who not only translated the first and third books into English, but made dramatic, author-sanctioned changes to the text as he did so—has been hired to consult on the project as well. Those inclusions may go some way toward allaying fears that Weiss and Benioff wouldn’t know how to properly handle this distinctly nonwhite property." ALSO: How long until David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are dropped from The Three-Body Problem?