Has any show ever had such a legendary amount of backlash to its final season as Game of Thrones? After captivating viewers around the world and building an incredibly passionate following, the show burned down its goodwill at the finish line just as surely as Daenerys Targaryen burned down King's Landing.
Opinions for how Thrones went astray vary widely depending on who you ask, but the bulk of the fury fell on showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss. To this day, if you Google "bad writers," Benioff and Weiss are the first thing that comes up, thanks to a concerted fan effort — and that's not even getting into the petition to "remake Game of Thrones season 8 with competent writers," which garnered over 1,864,000 signatures.
Though I'm strongly of the opinion that there are still plenty of highlights to be found in Game of Thrones' final season, I do think that there's one particular culprit: the show's rushed pacing. After spending six seasons moving pieces around the chess board, Game of Thrones finished with two shortened seasons that speed ran a number of important events, including Dany's arrival in Westeros and romance with Jon Snow, the White Walker invasion, Cersei Lannister's reign as Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, and of course, Daenerys' heel turn into becoming a genocidal despot.
We spent 60 episodes reaching these events, only to quickly wrap them all up in a measly 13 episodes, split into 7 for season 7 and 6 for season 8. No matter how well Game of Thrones navigated those final seasons, I think fans would have felt let down because of how little room there was for these major events and character developments to breathe.
And while I never want to contribute to dogpiling, the decision to wrap Game of Thrones up so quickly is one of the few things we can say with certainty fell squarely on Weiss and Benioff's shoulders. HBO has gone on record as saying they would have given Thrones as many episodes and seasons as its showrunners wanted. Author George R.R. Martin pushed for 10 seasons at least. But Weiss and Benioff were insistent on sticking to this plan for 7-8 seasons they had envisioned, to the point of folly.
This all comes to mind right now because Netflix's sci-fi show 3 Body Problem, Weiss and Benioff's first major series since Game of Thrones, just got an update that is taking me right back to those final seasons of Thrones. After debuting with an eight-episode first season that loosely covered the events of Cixin Liu's novel The Three-Body Problem, the show has filmed its second and third seasons back-to-back to finish out the story of the rest of Liu's trilogy. The catch we've now learned about, however, is that both of those seasons will be much shorter: season 2 is reportedly only six episodes long, while season 3 will consist of a mere five episodes.
It's all enough to make me wonder: are David Benioff and Dan Weiss about to recreate their worst mistake with Game of Thrones? Have they learned nothing from that experience and its subsequent backlash?
Can 3 Body Problem wrap up in only 11 more episodes?
3 Body Problem is in an interesting place as an adaptation. The show's first season keeps plenty of core elements from Cixin Liu's novels, but takes massive liberties elsewhere. The core characters of the books are primarily Chinese; the show globalizes its story, inventing new main characters and relationship dynamics.
At the same time, the main narrative of the Trisolarian invasion remains in tact. It's discovered that an extraterrestrial people whose own planet is caught in a dire struggle against physics have set their sights on Earth, and once the cat is out of the bag, the Trisolarians use invisible supercomputers called sophons to hamper Earth's scientific progress to make the planet easier to conquer when they finally arrive.
However, 3 Body Problem diverges from Game of Thrones in one significant way: it's already very much an adaptation of the entire saga at once, rather than the first book specifically. Elements from Liu's second and third books have already made their way into the show, such as the Wallfacers from The Dark Forest and the brain transfer of a terminal cancer patient into a probe headed for the Trisolarians, which happens in the final book, Death's End. In essence, the 3 Body Problem show took the main storylines from all three novels and seeded them into a collegiate friend group, knitting the plotlines tighter together right from the jump.
This makes it much harder to predict how the overall show will play out compared to the book series. It also means that Benioff, Weiss, and their co-showrunner Alexander Woo have a better chance of successfully compressing the saga into these final two, shortened seasons than Weiss and Benioff did with Game of Thrones.
That said, there is one particular lesson I'm really hoping that the Thrones showrunners learned from the HBO show's backlash.
Spectacle vs substance
A common criticism of the later seasons of Game of Thrones is that they leaned a bit too heavily on spectacle. This resulted in some absolutely breathtaking episodes, like "Battle of the Bastards" and "The Long Night," but it came with a cost: less time spent on the quiet, no-less-important moments that made those big swings land properly. The reason Dany's heel turn didn't work isn't because it wouldn't have made sense, but because the show completely dropped the ball on exploring how her psyche was cracking.
Jaime Lannister going back to Cersei in the penultimate episode similarly didn't land for many fans, because we spent multiple seasons watching Jaime become a better person, only for him to snap back to his toxic sister/lover over the course of two episodes that didn't justify the decision particularly well.
Game of Thrones built a reputation for showstopper episodes that broke the internet, and by the time it got late in its run, that reputation started to hinder it. The production placed an outsize amount of focus on those massive episodes, and as a result the substantative parts of the story became more and more undercooked.
While 3 Body Problem may not have quite the same hurdles as Game of Thrones for its final two seasons, I sincerely hope this is one area it improves on David Benioff and Dan Weiss's era-defining fantasy series. Give us spectacle, yes, but spend enough time on the substance to make it sing. The show's first season managed that well; here's hoping the rest lives up to that high bar, even with its shortened episode count.
3 Body Problem season 2 is expected to premiere sometime in 2026.