A Sense of Doubt blog post #3368 - Is the Three-Body Problem Unadaptable?
Yet another post about the amazing Three-Body Problem novel and Netflix show.
My previous two posts are linked below.
Thanks for tuning in!!
https://www.wired.com/story/gadget-lab-podcast-637/?bxid=5cec2546fc942d3ada0b15f8
3 Body Problem Is a Tech-Heavy Head Trip
This week on Gadget Lab, we discuss how the new
(very good) Netflix series 3 Body Problem fits into the sci-fi
pantheon.
3 BODY PROBLEM is Netflix’s new big, meaty prestige sci-fi series. Based on the book of the same name by author Liu Cixin, the show about an impending alien invasion is also one about how humans react to technological advancements and social movements that spiral out of control. Aliens aside, it tackles many of the same issues modern society is facing right now—political instability, fanaticism, and maybe an over-dependence on virtual reality. The new show is helmed by the former showrunners of Game of Thrones and surprise surprise, this high-concept drama is in fact very good.
This week on Gadget Lab, we talk all about 3 Body Problem—how the tech and cultural events in the show mirror the real world, and how it stacks up against the likes of Game of Thrones and other prestige TV.
Read Amit Katwala’s interview with the main showrunners of 3 Body Problem. Here’s Lauren’s story about crying in VR. Speaking of VR, read WIRED’s review of the Apple Vision Pro.
Kate recommends the show Silo on Apple TV+. Lauren recommends the movie One Day on Netflix. Mike recommends the Transmissions podcast by Aquarium Drunkard.
Kate Knibbs can be found on social media @Knibbs. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:
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Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: Do you believe in extraterrestrial intelligence?
Lauren Goode: You mean aliens? You're asking me if I believe in aliens?
Michael Calore: I am asking you. Do you think there is intelligent life somewhere out there in the universe?
Lauren Goode: I believe there is life. Whether or not life is constrained to our definition of it here on Earth. I don't think it's necessarily intelligent. Refer to Fermi's paradox. If we haven't seen them yet, where are they?
Michael Calore: Well, maybe they're very far away. I don't know. But either way, there is a new television show about alien intelligence that I want to talk about this week.
Lauren Goode: Oh, Gadget Lab is a culture podcast now. Well, for what it's worth, I generally don't like sci-fi. Does that mean that I get kicked out of the WIRED newsroom?
Michael Calore: Yes, but not … We have to finish recording first. So we'll let you stay for the show, and then we'll have a chat about your sci-fi …
Lauren Goode: Aversion.
Michael Calore: Aversion.
Lauren Goode: Thank you so much.
Michael Calore: All right, let's do it.
Lauren Goode: Let's do it.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Michael Calore: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore, WIRED's director of consumer tech and culture.
Lauren Goode: And I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: We are also joined once again this week by WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs. Hi Kate.
Kate Knibbs: Hi guys. Thank you so much for having me.
Michael Calore: Of course. Thanks for joining us.
Lauren Goode: Friend of the pod.
Kate Knibbs: Mm-hmm.
Michael Calore: Today, we are talking about the new science fiction series 3 Body Problem. It premieres today, March 21st, on Netflix. Now, normally we save all of our recommendations for movies and TV for the end of the show, but since this particular Netflix series touches on a lot of topics that we cover at WIRED, we wanted to take a deep dive into it. Plus, Kate was really eager to talk about it. And how could we say no to Kate?
The show is based on a book trilogy by the Chinese novelist Liu Cixin. 3 Body Problem was adapted from the novels and brought to Netflix by the production team of David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo. And if you watch premium television, then you know those names, because Benioff and Weiss created Game of Thrones, and Woo was a writer and executive producer on True Blood, my favorite show. So we're going to do our best to keep this show spoiler-free. You can watch all the episodes now because Netflix puts the whole thing out at once. So we will be talking about some plot points in 3 Body Problem, but we will not be giving away the ending or anything major. So speaking of endings, we have to start at the beginning. Kate, can you please tell us why you're excited about this show and give us a bit of an overview of the show's premise?
Kate Knibbs: Absolutely. I mean, I do love a sprawling sci-fi epic, so I'm definitely sort of the target audience. I've read the first book, and I really, really liked it. I actually have The Dark Forest, which is the second book in this trilogy. The trilogy is called Remembrance of Earth's Past. I have it in my Amazon cart, but I want to buy it at a local bookstore. So I've been meaning to go up to my local bookstore and buy it. Anyways, I'm excited about it because I've had a Game of Thrones-sized hole in my TV watching heart for years, and I feel like this might fill the void.
So it's an adaptation of another beloved book franchise. The first season is going to focus primarily on the first book, which is called The 3 Body Problem. And it spans decades. There's a big chunk of the book that takes place in China during the Cultural Revolution and then immediately after the Cultural Revolution, and then there's a big chunk of the book that takes place more in present day. And it basically follows a bunch of different individuals who end up discovering that we are not alone in the universe. And I don't know how to say much more about it without spoiling it, but there's a lot going on. There's aliens, there's people on the ground who want the aliens to come. There's people on the ground that don't want the aliens to come, and it's rollicking and it's cerebral too. Lauren mentioned Fermi's paradox and 3 Body Problem puts forth another sort of explanation for why we don't know about aliens, which is called the Dark Forest theory, which is that they're here, but they're silent because they're hostile to other civilizations.
Lauren Goode: What does the title 3 Body Problem mean?
Kate Knibbs: So it's a reference to … I'm totally an English major, but I think it's a reference to something that people actually talk about in physics.
Lauren Goode: Kate, I just have to note quickly that one of the rare critiques we have gotten on this show in the Apple Podcast comments is that we're a bunch of English majors talking about tech. So welcome to the show. Also, I welcome the criticism. Yes, in fact, we are. And please leave us a good review on Apple Podcasts. Continue.
Kate Knibbs: Yes, the nicest reviews. OK. So I think the three-body problem is something that's actually discussed in physics. Within the world of the show, it references something that is happening with some aliens, maybe potentially where a planet has three suns, and the way that the the planet orbits around the suns causes a lot of issues for people. And so the three-body problem is them asking, how do we not die because of the chaos that orbiting around three suns causes. Is that right, Mike? Did I do a good job?
Michael Calore: Yeah, yeah, that's right. I've done a lot of googling since I started watching this show, and that does sound right. So it's that there is no predictable way for a planet to orbit around three suns. So it ends up in a chaotic orbit where sometimes it's stuck around one sun and sometimes it's bouncing around between two or all three. And yeah, it's almost impossible as far as we know to sustain life on a planet like that, because the suns are all different temperatures. The orbits are different and—
Lauren Goode: It's like a sun throuple.
Michael Calore: It's like a sun quadruple. So one thing that actually you touched on that I wanted to talk about is that the science in the show, and I assume in the books, you've read the books, you can tell us. The books were commended for how accurately they portrayed the science. One of the main characters is involved in research at a radio telescope. There's a lot of stuff about interstellar communication, bouncing transmissions off the sun. Some of the main characters are physics researchers at a particle accelerator in Oxford. So all of this comes across in the show and it does feel very science-accurate. So I am curious to find out what the scientific community is going to think about the television adaptation, but from your watching of it and having read the books, is it dumbed down at all for TV?
Kate Knibbs: I think that they definitely made some adaptation choices to make it appeal to a wider audience, but I don't think they're really dumbing down the science. I was actually surprised. I feel like there's been a big investment in character building in the TV show, whereas the book is fantastic, but it is really more of an exploration of all of these different ideas than a deep dive into any one character's mental state. I've been really enjoying the expanded attention to the human relationships in the show, and I get why they did that, because people usually need to have their hard sci-fi anchored in human relationships to make it work for a general audience. One other kind of surprising thing they did in the show adaptation was they took one character and made him a bunch of different characters in the show, whereas usually I feel if there's a book adaptation, it ends up cutting characters when it gets made into a movie or TV show. So this did the opposite, which I wasn't expecting, but I like.
Lauren Goode: And Kate, you mentioned that this spans decades. It starts off with the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, and then it kind of zooms to modern times, 2024. But in both eras, the scientists, they're maligned either by people in society or by these alien life forces. And spoiler alert, you find this out in the first episode, which is the only one that I've watched so far. In some instances, these scientists are even killed. During that time, Einstein was a main target of criticism too. How much of the show is rooted in actual history and how much is historical revision?
Kate Knibbs: Well, the opening scene of the TV show happens in the book too. It's sort of stage setting, and it's very, very important for one of the main characters' motivations, the scientist Ye, and she sees her father, who's a really prominent physicist, killed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and that's really not a spoiler because it happened right away in the books too. It's fine. And that really informs her view of humanity, and what her view of humanity is ends up really affecting the plot in an interesting way. So I guess all you can say to that is anti-intellectualism is no good for us. So anyways, this is a very long way of answering your question about historical accuracy. But yes, there are lots of scenes that seem fairly accurate to what was happening in the Cultural Revolution. And the author's family was, I believe sent to a work camp when he was young, so it's probably rooted in some of his lived experience. But most of the stuff in modern day seems sort of not a direct corollary to anything that's going on now.
Michael Calore: The karaoke night in the first episode looks a lot like a contemporary karaoke night. That's a good historical representation.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. And the moment when the guy hits on the two women at the bar, and he's like, “Hey ladies,” and one of them is like, “Hey, I run a nanoparticle company,” and the other one's like, “Yeah, I'm a physicist who's studying the velocity of particles.” And he's like, “Right on, see you later.” That was pretty accurate.
Michael Calore: Yeah, it was pretty accurate. OK, well, we need to take a quick break and then we'll come right back with more.
[Break]
Michael Calore: All right. I want to talk about the headset on the show. Now the VR headset on the show is very different than what VR headsets look like today, but Lauren, being our VR expert here in the room, I want you to walk us through what this thing is in the show and your thoughts about it.
Lauren Goode: Right. So as soon as I saw this, I thought, "Oh, it's like the Apple Vision Pro." There's a moment in the first episode when Jin, the main character, is at the home of one of her deceased colleagues, and she's talking to the colleague's mother and expressing her condolences. And then all of a sudden she looks in her deceased colleague's bedroom and she says, “What is that?” And it's a mask, and she pulls it up and it's like a VR headset, but it's much more sleek looking, and she puts it on her face and she's transported into this virtual world. And what's kind of uncanny about this, I think, is the timing of it, because this part of the show takes place in 2024, but presumably it was shot and produced before 2024, and then the actual Apple Vision Pro comes out in 2024. So I was like, “Wow, this is really good timing.”
The headset in 3 Body Problem is much more sleek. It's like Apple Vision Pro generation three or something. It also boots up remarkably quickly when Jin puts it on; she's automatically transported into the virtual world. You're not waiting for someone to boot it up and authenticate with their eyes or saying, “Sorry, this is logged into your account. Can you log out so I can log in? Sorry, I have to measure my pupillary distance now to make sure that it works.” Well, that would really drag down the pacing of a television show. The thing that I haven't gotten to yet, although the trailer has teased this, is that I think this virtual world, this game world is going to be a critical part of the narrative. Is that correct Kate? Tell us about this.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Kate Knibbs: Oh yeah. And I can talk about it broadly that there are big chunks of the book, at least, that are spent in this virtual world, and it's definitely very important to the narrative, and it is kind of mind-blowing when you think the book was written 20 years ago. So he was really ahead of his time with the Apple Vision Pro prediction, and I have really enjoyed the visuals that they've brought to those sections. Those are actually kind of my least favorite sections of the book because I hate video games, and so I just have a general disinterest honestly in most narratives that are gaming-based. But again, I got on board with this one because of the spectacle, and it's pretty seamlessly interwoven into the plot of the show, I think. Yeah.
Michael Calore: Lauren, I will say, because you find out in a later episode that it does authenticate through the eyes.
Lauren Goode: Oh, it does?
Michael Calore: Yeah, it does a retinal scan.
Lauren Goode: So how does it work then if the mask belongs to a character who's no longer alive?
Michael Calore: If you put on the mask and you were not invited to put on the mask, then a game character walks up and immediately kills you, cuts your head off.
Lauren Goode: No, really?
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Wait, is that a spoiler for the show?
Michael Calore: No, it's just one of those things that I can tell you that and it's not going to spoil you.
Lauren Goode: You're serious?
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Wow.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: That is dark. So Tim Cook appears out of nowhere and he's like, “That Apple Vision Pro is not for you.”
Michael Calore: Yeah. It's like a ninja person. So it does sort of have some parallels with an Apple briefing where you have to be invited to the Apple briefing, and if you're not invited to play the game because the game is invite only, then they send you a headset to join.
Lauren Goode: This has very light shades of that Olivia Wilde movie that came out with Florence Pugh, and it was Harry Styles doing some … acting.
Michael Calore: Oh yeah, Don't Worry Darling.
Lauren Goode: Yes. And for those of you who haven't seen that, I don't want to spoil that, but there's a strong VR element, what happens in the world is actually happening in VR type part of that, which was a real twist at the end. That's all I'll say about that.
Michael Calore: But I love the design of the headset. I think it's super cool. It reminds me of those Oakley sunglasses that went over the top of your head because there's a big band that goes over the top of your head, but presumably there's a bunch of sensors in it that touch your skin and tap into your brain or something. So yeah, I mean, it looks awesome. And now I think honestly, the designers of the show who designed the VR headset are probably going to end up being influential on the next five years of VR headset design.
Kate Knibbs: It looks a lot cooler than what's available on the market right now. It's one that I would consider wearing.
Michael Calore: There's no battery pack.
Kate Knibbs: Yes. I think you can cry in it.
Michael Calore: The other thing is that nobody on the show wears glasses.
Lauren Goode: Oh.
Michael Calore: It just slots right onto their—
Lauren Goode: Interesting. There are a bunch of scientists who don't wear glasses.
Michael Calore: There are people on the show who wear glasses, but you do not see them putting the headset on. Although I imagine that since it taps into your brain, it can probably correct for corrective vision.
Lauren Goode: OK. So once again, with the disclaimer that I've only seen the first episode, Kate, how well do all of these themes actually mesh together? Because we're talking about … I mean, we're nerds talking about Fermi's paradox at the top of the show, but we're talking about physics and particle accelerators and the Chinese Cultural Revolution and virtual games and did I say aliens already?
Michael Calore: Quantum physics.
Lauren Goode: Quantum physics and then the human relationships. So there's a lot going on here. Does it all come together?
Kate Knibbs: I mean, I think it does. Again, I have been shocked by how much I'm enjoying it. I got up super early this morning to squeeze another episode in, because I just want to keep seeing where it's going. And I'm saying that as someone who has already read the book, so I have some knowledge, but they've made the introduction of the five … there's five younger scientist characters that are in the show that are all new. They're not in the book, and they are the ones that have a lot of the interpersonal relationship issues and stuff. So I'm getting invested in their characters. I don't know where it's going.
And all of the scientific ideas surrounding their interpersonal dramas, yeah, I think it's really well done. I'm shocked. I am also shocked that Netflix is dropping this all at once, even though I know that's what Netflix does. I just feel like it would be a show … There are so many episodes that are ending on jaw-dropping moments that I think the show would've perhaps benefited from a week-by-week drop schedule to build momentum and get people talking about it. I'm a little worried that it all coming out at once is going to be detrimental to it becoming a cultural phenomenon. What do you think?
Michael Calore: No, don't police my television watching pace. The days of shows coming out once a week, unless it's like a news program, the days of shows coming out once a week are a really annoying leftover from the world when we did not have everything on demand.
Kate Knibbs: I like it.
Michael Calore: I think if you're going to put out a show, just put out the whole thing. So what if I want to watch it all at once? It doesn't matter.
Lauren Goode: Some of us have deadlines to meet. You can't go binging.
Michael Calore: But sometimes you just want to see what happens next. And I agree with Kate. The cliffhangers on this show are expertly created. Also, there are a lot of big set piece moments, and they don't all come at the ends of the episode. They usually come in the middle of the episode.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. I did notice that. Yeah.
Michael Calore: So like it ramps up to a big event.
Lauren Goode: There's action happening all the time.
Michael Calore: And they don't shy away from showing you the aftermath, which I think is really important, because it continues to drive the plot forward. Adds a lot of emotion. So yeah, very expertly created and paced, and if you want to watch it all at once, by God, watch it all at once.
Lauren Goode: That is related to my recommendation, but I'll save it.
Michael Calore: OK. Well, that's actually a very good segue because there's really not much more we can say about the show without spoiling it, so we should move on to our recommendations, but we can all recommend the show. I think we're all enjoying it. We really like it. 3 Body Problem premieres on Netflix today. If you're listening to this podcast, it is available for you to stream. Also, we must say that our colleague Amit Katwala has an interview with the three showrunners of 3 Body Problem that is running on WIRED. Amit spoke to Alexander Woo, David Benioff, and D.B. Weiss about the show, and you can read that Q&A on WIRED now. OK, let's take a break and then we'll go to recommendations.
[Break]
Michael Calore: OK Kate, as our guest, what's your recommendation this week?
Kate Knibbs: Actually, I'm going to recommend another sci-fi series that's a book adaptation and I wrote about it when I came out last year, which is Silo on Apple+. It's adapted from Hugh Howey's Wool book series. One of them is called Silo, which the books are great too. The show is fantastic, and I feel like it got buried in Apple TV … Is it Apple TV+ or Apple TV?
Michael Calore: Apple TV+.
Lauren Goode: Apple TV+. Yeah. Just add a plus to everything now if they're charging you $9 a month or more for it, it's just plus.
Kate Knibbs: Yeah, Apple TV+ has this little collection of prestige sci-fi, and a lot of it's really well done, and it's just not taking off. I think it deserves to, and Silo is so good, and I think people should watch that too.
Michael Calore: Awesome. And so it came out last year. Are they doing another season soon?
Kate Knibbs: I don't know. There's lots of material that they could be working from. I hope they're doing another season. If they don't, though, it definitely stands alone as a miniseries, and it's about people who live in this underground silo sometime in the future, and things are not what they appear, and it's excellent. Yeah, heartily recommend.
Lauren Goode: I hear that if you get an Apple Vision Pro and you put it on your face, Tim Cook appears and tells you what their next season's lineup is going to be.
Michael Calore: There's Apple products in all of the Apple TV plus shows, right? They use their streaming channel as a way to show off how good their products are.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, they're never using Signal. They're always like bloop and blue messages when they message people in the program.
Michael Calore: I'm sorry. It's very annoying. It's very annoying to imagine a world where three quarters of the planet is not using Android. Kate, what's the status of Apple devices in the near future on Silo?
Kate Knibbs: I don't think they have any, but that's because they've been in the Silo for a really long time I think. I am not sure about the exact timeline, but I think they went in the Silo before Tim even took the reins. They might've been down there ... I don't know. They have really old-school '90s desktops. There's no blue bubbles to worry about.
Michael Calore: Are they Mac clones?
Kate Knibbs: I don't know.
Michael Calore: Are they Motorola Mac clones? That'd be amazing.
Kate Knibbs: I'll have to rewatch and take a look at the gadgetry.
Michael Calore: I'll watch it. Thank you for the recommendation. Lauren, what is your recommendation?
Lauren Goode: Despite my throwing shade at you earlier for binge-watching, mine is a binge-watch, and there's a little story behind this that's related to 3 Body Problem. So listeners should know that Netflix gave us all early access to 3 Body Problem, and we had to log int o our Netflix accounts and enter a pin code, because we had to be approved to get these digital screeners. And over the weekend, I went to go watch 3 Body Problem and realized I didn't have the pin code. So I emailed Netflix on a Sunday and just was like, "Hey, I am really sorry, but I don't think I have this pin code, and so I can't watch this." It took them all of four minutes to get back to me.
Michael Calore: I noticed that.
Lauren Goode: But in the meantime, I put my phone down and I turned at the TV and I was like, "Well, I should probably watch something else," so I put on One Day.
Michael Calore: And you watched the whole thing in two days?
Lauren Goode: Seven hours went by, I watched almost the entire thing on Sunday.
Michael Calore: Wow. When you should have been working.
Lauren Goode: Thank you, boss. Look, I really needed a rest day. I was exhausted, and I was like, "This is going to be a couch day." I did get up and go for a walk to a coffee shop at some point, did some writing, but I was in it, and I was in it. I was like, "I need to know what happens to M Index. I need to know now. I still have not watched the final episode, but the penultimate is, it's devastating. You have to get through that one. I loved it. I loved it. It reminded me of … a lot of people are saying, this reminded me of normal people, but it's a love story, but it's not an overly saccharine love story. It feels very real about these two young people.
And speaking of technology, it starts in the ‘80s and it tracks their long-term friendship throughout the ’90s, and there's almost no technology. They're writing letters and postcards. There's a pivotal moment when one of the characters gets a mobile phone, and then she's like, “Oh, I finally got a mobile phone. I didn't think I was going to resist.” And there are moments when they're missing each other because they're leaving messages on voicemail machines. What are they called? Answering machines.
Michael Calore: What are they called?
Lauren Goode: I know. Yes, this is when I grew up. And so I loved it. I really loved it for that element of it.
Michael Calore: I'm pushing 50 right now, and I grew up in the '80s, and it very much reminded me of those days, when you really could not be reached and how glorious they were.
Lauren Goode: Really, really wonderful.
Michael Calore: Yeah, decent music in the show too.
Lauren Goode: Really good. “Waterloo Sunset,” the Kinks.
Michael Calore: “Waterloo Sunset,” the Kinks. Also, a book adaptation.
Lauren Goode: Oh, yes, that's right.
Michael Calore: Yeah. And it was a movie.
Lauren Goode: And it was a movie, but the movie got panned.
Michael Calore: It was terrible. Saw it on a plane.
Lauren Goode: Yes. No, this is One Day. It's very sweet. It's touching. It's funny. It's sad. Yeah. So thanks Netflix.
Michael Calore: And it's got the Essex guy from White Lotus in it.
Lauren Goode: Oh, whew.
Michael Calore: Oh yeah. Are you saying he's good-looking? Is that what—
Lauren Goode: I mean, yeah, objectively speaking. They're both beautiful people. Both of the lead actors are. Yeah, it's great.
Michael Calore: OK, good recommendation.
Lauren Goode: So Mike, what's your recommendation?
Michael Calore: I'm not recommending a show. I'm recommending a podcast. It's an old podcast, but it's new to me. It's called Transmissions, and it's by the folks at Aquarium Drunkard. You might remember Aquarium Drunkard as a music blog, which it was and still is. I think there are like … from the music blog era of the early 2000s, there are a few that still exist, like Brooklyn Vegan is one and Aquarium Drunkard is another. And they all have silly names because when you start a blog 20 years ago, you give it a silly name.
So Aquarium Drunkard has a full, big old regular media operation now, and they do an excellent interview podcast. It's called Transmissions, and it is a lot of interviews with musicians, but also some artists, some archivists, some authors, people in popular culture. So it's a very good kind of indie, kind of underground popular culture interview podcast. I really like it. I came to it because this week or the week that I found it, maybe it was last week, the interview subject is John Lurie, the guy from Painting with John and Fishing with John and The History of Bones. I've recommended like—
Lauren Goode: I was going to say you've recommended him before.
Michael Calore: Yeah. All of his stuff is awesome, and he is such a fantastic interview. He's so funny. And he has the best voice for audio. He should have his own show. He used to have a show, I think, on YouTube, and it only did a couple episodes, and now his show is done on HBO. So please, let's give John Lurie some love and we'll give him some work. Anyway, that's my recommendation. Aquarium Drunkard, Transmissions.
Lauren Goode: It's a great name. What does it actually mean?
Michael Calore: Aquarium Drunkard?
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: Oh, it's a reference to a Wilco song.
Lauren Goode: Oh.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Aquarium drink.
Lauren Goode: Can you sing it for us?
Michael Calore: “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.” It's the first song on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Lauren Goode: Oh yeah, I know that song quite well. Wait, what line is it?
Michael Calore: The very first line.
Lauren Goode: Really?
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Kate Knibbs: [singing] I'm an American aquarium drinker.
Lauren Goode: Oh.
Kate Knibbs: Yeah.
Michael Calore: Yep.
Kate Knibbs: Chicago excellence.
Michael Calore: Chicago excellence. The Miracle Mile.
Lauren Goode: Next episode on Gadget Lab, breaking down Wilco. Kate Knibbs returns.
Kate Knibbs: If I had my way.
Michael Calore: We got to get Tweedy on this show.
Kate Knibbs: Mm-hmm.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Kate Knibbs: Mm-hmm.
Michael Calore: And Nels. Nels' my old buddy. OK, well, Kate singing seems like the best place to end the show. Go out on a high note literally. Thank you for joining us Kate Knibbs. I hope we change your mind about video games.
Kate Knibbs: Thank you so much for having me. Feel free to auto-tune me. I give you permission to do anything you want with any sort of AI voice tools you want to experiment. No, thank you so much for letting me talk about 3 Body Problem. I'm super excited that it's good, and it's always a pleasure to talk to you guys.
Michael Calore: Me too, me too.
Lauren Goode: It's great to have you on.
Michael Calore: And thank you all for listening. If you have feedback, you can endorse all of us on LinkedIn. Just check the show notes. Our producer is Boone Ashworth, and we will be back with another new show next week. And until then, goodbye.
[Gadget Lab outro theme music plays]
Lauren Goode: Why do I always close my eyes when we do room tone?
Michael Calore: It's a little meditation.
Lauren Goode: It is. I'm meditating.
Lauren Goode: Also, my eyes make noise when they blink.
Michael Calore: Do they?
Lauren Goode: No.
Michael Calore: See if you can hear mine.
[Everyone starts blinking furiously into the mics.]
Kate Knibbs: Mine kind of do.
Lauren Goode: Mine do!
Kate Knibbs: Oh, I don't like thinking about that.
[Everyone laughs.]
https://www.wired.com/story/netflix-3-body-problem-benioff-weiss-woo-interview/
Netflix’s 3 Body
Problem Adapts the Unadaptable
For their next trick, Game of Thrones showrunners
David Benioff and D. B. Weiss are tackling a complex piece of Chinese science
fiction. This time, they know how it ends.
But really, it’s all about physics. Liu’s novels are beloved in China and have a smaller but similarly dedicated following among English-language readers, but they are hard science fiction—heavy on concept, light on character. More than once in the series, someone resorts to wheeling out a chalkboard to make their point, and there are scenes in the books that seem impossible to film: multidimensional structures collapsing in on themselves, a computer made up of millions of soldiers, nano-wires cutting through steel, diamond, flesh.
For showrunners David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo, adapting The Three-Body Problem for the screen presented a unique challenge. Woo was a writer on HBO’s True Blood, but Benioff and Weiss are best known for Game of Thrones. An adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire, Thrones became a once-in-a-decade television phenomenon, but didn’t quite stick the landing—in some corners of the internet the names Benioff and Weiss are on a level with Joffrey Baratheon.
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| (L to R) 3 Body Problem executive producers and writers D. B. Weiss, Alexander Woo, and David Benioff.COURTESY OF AUSTIN HARGRAVE/NETFLIX |
So there may be some trepidation for those weighing whether to watch their new show. But 3 Body Problem has all the ingredients that made those early seasons of Game of Thrones so compelling: jaw-dropping set pieces, a web of interpersonal conflict, and an existential threat slowly marching toward the gates.
WIRED spoke to Benioff, Weiss, and Woo about the challenge of adapting a series previously thought to be unadaptable.
Amit Katwala: You’ve talked about how you read the novels simultaneously and decided this was the thing you wanted to work on next. What really attracted you to Three-Body Problem as something to adapt?
David Benioff: We might have three different answers. For me, there were so many scenes in the books that I read and thought, “I really want to see this.” Throughout the whole trilogy there are so many scenes that are thrilling to read, but also as a TV writer and producer deeply intimidating, because you’re thinking, how are we going to show multiple dimensions on screen? How is that going to work? I literally can’t visualize some of the things that are described in the book. The only other time I’ve had that experience is with George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.
D. B. Weiss: Something that you’re going to devote this much of your life to, it has to haunt you. It has to be something that when you put it down and walk away it just keeps lurking in your mind. I read these books and I’d be thinking about them while I was going for a walk, I’d be thinking about them when I was taking my kids to school. I never stopped thinking about them.
In something like Game of Thrones you embody the characters as a reader, whereas the text you’re working from here is much more concept-driven. The characters are kind of empty, in the manner of Isaac Asimov or some of that idea-heavy sci-fi of the 1950s. How did you go about filling in those gaps?
Weiss: It’s funny that you mention Asimov, because when I was reading the book it was very clear that Cixin Liu had grown up on that Golden Age pulp science fiction. Some of those authors, people like Robert Heinlein, were very character-driven in their ways. Others like Asimov were more cerebral. And I think Cixin Liu, by his own admission, falls into that second category. There are great characters in the books that have a lot of potential, but they don’t interact with any of the other characters, which is something we needed to address.
How did you do that?
Weiss: There are characters that plot-wise do really interesting things, but in terms of their history and relationship to the other characters we almost needed to fill them with a new backstory. We needed to create a different person and put them in the “plot skin.” It’s a lot of the fun of the adaptation, but from the beginning we knew that was going to be at least 50 percent of the heavy lifting we had to do.
The full trilogy spans thousands of years—do you know how things are going to end?
Benioff: We definitely have the ending in mind. We don’t have a lot of the middle in mind yet.
The books go into a lot of detail about particle accelerators and computer programming and astronomy. How did you balance staying true to the science with keeping things entertaining?
Alexander Woo: Well none of us are physicists, which I think actually made us great guinea pigs for what could be understandable. In the novels, some of it can get quite abstruse. An advantage of the novel form is that you can read it at your own pace, you can slow down, you can go back, you can look things up on the internet. Ideally, in a television show you won’t have to do that: The whole show just flows in front of you, and the idea is presented in a way that you can digest whether you’re a physicist or not.
As non-physicists, what was your solution to that?
Woo: We had two science consultants on our show—a particle physicist and a rocket scientist—and they gave us and the cast and crew a crash course explaining various different concepts within the show. We gained as much from the information they gave us as the way they presented it. So we spent a lot of time on that and not making people feel like they were doing homework.
Weiss: The hope is that somebody who is knowledgeable about this stuff will look at those visual science Easter eggs and know what they’re looking at. Somebody who is not knowledgeable about it will look at it and recognize that something complex is going on, and it’s something new and beautiful, and know enough to carry them forward in the story. It was a constant dance we were doing between the explanation and momentum.
These books are popular, but maybe not quite at the level that A Song of Ice and Fire was when you started turning it into Game of Thrones. Did you feel you had more freedom to diverge from the books and how much you could change things?
Benioff: I think they are that popular in mainland China, but not in the West. Everyone I’ve met who is from over there has read them, though, or they’re like, “Everyone in my family has read them.”
George’s books were on the bestseller list even before the adaptation, but even so, you have to do what you think is right for the series. Oftentimes that means deviating from the text. I can’t remember ever consciously thinking, “Well we can’t do that because fans are going to get annoyed.” You do it anyway if you think that’s what’s right for the show. I think the simplest answer is probably no. Maybe we’ll get less hate mail than we did with the other one, but it’s the same basic creative process.
I guess you know the ending this time around which helps …
Benioff: [Laughs] Yeah …
Weiss: There aren’t really that many series out there—I suppose for the people adapting Harry Potter they were up against a very real situation of: If we decide that Harry should do this instead of what he does in the books there’s going to be an army of knife-wielding 12-year-olds coming to your door. If a billion people have read your books you’re in a different situation. But almost anything shy of that I think you run into the situation David was describing, just by the nature of television and sizes of audiences you need to do what’s best for it as a show.
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