3 Body Problem is not, strictly speaking, David Benioff and DB Weiss’s first series since wrapping up Game of Thrones . The first project of their lucrative deal with Netflix was, improbably, The Chair , a sharp, underrated campus satire which they executive produced. It was cancelled after one season, its modest budget perhaps now funding a single second of CGI in this exceedingly costly sci-fi series, created by Benioff and Weiss along with Alexander Woo.
The show, which revolves around telegenic scientists, apocalyptic events and strange galactic phenomena, is based on Liu Cixin’s eponymous bestseller: an opus combining physics, philosophy and politics. But if adapting such rich material seems like a no-brainer, the show itself is middling fare that bends minds but rarely engages them in its meditations on human nature, technology, the state of this planet and those far beyond.
The eight-part first season begins in 1960s Maoist China, where a brilliant, regime-renouncing astrophysicist called Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) is forced to work at a secret military observatory. There she makes an extraordinary discovery and a world-shaping decision — the repercussions of which we follow in the show’s second, present-day storyline.
In this alternate 2024, science is “broken”; alarming data anomalies and distressing visions have driven dozens of leading scientists to apparent suicide. So when tech innovator Auggie (Eiza González) begins to see an ominous countdown in front of her eyes, she and four other former Oxford classmates start searching for answers. Instead, they encounter more inexplicable mysteries: disappearing stars, an invisible woman, a VR headset containing an unnervingly immersive problem-solving game. Following them all the while is a shadowy, saturnine detective, Clarence (Benedict Wong), who brings a touch of procedural earthiness to this sky-gazing sci-fi.
Recommended
While the series initially manages to offset early confusion with gripping suspense, slick pacing and well-timed reveals, it becomes unwieldy as it progresses. Characters saddled with explaining abstruse mechanical theories, meanwhile, never really seem to have more than one dimension themselves.
Still, there’s sufficient intrigue and splashy production to keep enough of us watching and dissuade Netflix from consigning 3 Body Problem to the same fate as The Chair . But I know which one I’d rather was renewed.
★★★☆☆
On Netflix from March 21