3 Body Problem (Netflix)

I decided to start watching the show. After four episodes, it feels, I don't know, disappointing. It's not terrible, but all the rave about the books made me expect something more.

Does it differ greatly from the books (preferably as spoiler-free answer as possible)?

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It's a pretty mystery-heavy show, so it's probably hard to judge smack dab in the middle.

Just finished episode one, which was excellent. About to start the second; I hope the quality continues!

After two episodes, I decided to stop and go to bed, just to give the first couple of episodes a little time to marinate. While the show pretty much nails the sections in China, I found some of the changes in regards to casting and characterization across the pond to be pretty confounding. I understand why they made the choice to delete a couple of Chinese characters and recast them in order to give the show a broader appeal to Western audiences, but it's the way they did it that has me scratching my head. Why go with a Abercrombie and Fitch CW style group of friends? Not sure I care for that. I think there was a better version of the cast that was still diverse, but didn't come off as such an obvious attempt at box-ticking. Why not have various characters from different scientific institutions from around the globe? I think that may have worked better. The books weren't really super character-driven, so clearly some changes had to happen to draw people into the show, but I have a feeling the way they went about it could end up unraveling and sending the show in directions it doesn't need to go. Hopefully they are able to keep the focus on the high concept stuff in the books while not becoming subsumed in melodrama.

That said, the show still does a lot right. I will watch more and report back afterward!

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I started watching a few episodes last night, and I am certainly curious as to where this is going. I don't enjoy the attempts at character drama like Sedai mentioned though. It has an Alex Garland and Devs kind of feel for me so far.

Still haven't got back to this yet. Splitting the main protagonist into 5 characters is really bizarre and I am still processing it. Will certainly continue watching once I get some time.

Initially, I thought the character split was just a necessary concession to the switch in mediums (in TV people care about characters more than plot, as a general rule, and the book's characters are exactly as poor as you'd expect from a hard sci-fi novel)...but after the first half of the season, I started to see what they were going for, realize which characters were being "assigned" which things in the story, and it started really working for me. There's a lot of cool allusions in there about things that happen later, or won't happen until next season (or even after that). They did a good job with the meta stuff and symbolism and all that.

I'm pleasantly surprised by the whole thing. I have a lot of criticisms, for sure, but there are a few things it nailed, were more or less exactly as I'd imagined, and some of the changes I can at least see were pretty thoughtful and show a lot of advance planning.

Definitely hope they get to make the whole thing because it gets much crazier, somehow.

like Lost?

fool me once shame on you

fool my twice and i’ll probably still keep watching

To me, there's always a big difference between mythology-heavy shows that are being potentially made-up and those drawing from existing source material. The books cohere (whatever my overall issues with them) and so far they've hit all the major story beats, so I expect they'll just keep doing that. The areas where they're putting their stamp on it is with the character stuff, which the books are pretty bad at anyway.

The big different here, at least according to the spoiler-free review over at Film Threat, is that this show delivers/reveals its mystery box stuff, instead of just blowing a ton of it off.

Allegedly!

Just finished the first season, and I thought it was a bit of a waste after such good introductory episodes. I'll defer to others in terms of how it will improve and develop based on the books, but I felt like the second half of the season was a letdown.

Much more "unnecessary" talking and character drama than desired, and some coincidental events that all seem to happen by good fortune just to move things along quicker. I'm being finicky, but I probably wouldn't have started watching this if I knew the whole thing was just going to set up the next season(s).

Allegedly.




At least IMHO, watching the show without novel contexts.

I'm about one third of the way through the first book. I'm itching to watch some of the series but I keep holding off.


Question for those who have read AND watched: Is this first season incorporating the first book? Then the second book will be the second season, etc.? Will I confuse myself more by watching any of the episodes now, not even halfway through the book?

The first season mostly incorporates the first book, but moves some things up from the second, and more importantly puts lots of little bits of foreshadowing (usually having to do with the changes they made, character-wise) for the series as a whole.

But no, I don't think you'll find it confusing either way.

For those of you who read the book(s) first: How did you discover them? I realized yesterday that I'm reading them because the Netflix series is getting a lot of buzz. I'd have never found them otherwise, and, frankly, I think I'd have stopped reading by now if it weren't for the series seeming very interesting. Wanting to eventually watch the show is keeping me reading.


If you read the books before even knowing about the series, what kept you reading? I'm not really engaged with the characters, and the plot, while intriguing, wouldn't be enough to keep me going without the show being dangled like a carrot on a stick in front of me.

I am constantly watching best-of lists and BookTube videos to add books to be To Read list. This got a lot of buzz when it was released. When I finally got around to reading them, only two books were out, so I had to wait a bit for the third to get released.

Thanks for this. I'm now at about 45% done with the first book. The writing seems a tad stilted to me in many sections--too much telling and not showing. The bits that are inside the Three Body world are far more fascinating and far more well written (IMHO), so I've found those parts way more engaging.

Also, I admit (to my shame) that part of my problem is probably getting character names confused. To my Western eye, many of the character names look similar as I read. (To be fair, this is the kind of issue I also had with the first Game of Thrones book...until I watched a few episodes of the then-new series and got the world and some of those early characters straight in my head. Then I breezed through with no problems.)

Now that I'm closing in on the halfway mark, I think I'm going to try to get through this first book before viewing any of the Netflix episodes.

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Yea, I think it's sort of universally accepted at this point that the characterizations are the weakest aspect of the books. The author was clearly more interested in the concepts, just sort of using the characters to convey them as he went along. I do recall that stuff improving quite a bit in the second book.

Instead of buying the books, I started watching the Chinese series. While it's technically inferior to the Netflix version, I like its approach more. That's after only five episodes of thirty, so there's lots of time to change my opinion.

The difference I like the most is...