A few weeks ago, Netflix officially renewed its sci-fi series 3 Body Problem — based on the Remembrance of Earth's Past books by Liu Cixi — for more episodes. But we didn't learn exactly how many more episodes or seasons we were going to get, just that creators David Benioff, Dan Weiss and Alexander Woo would get to bring the story to its "epic conclusion"
But now, Netflix has confirmed that the show will indeed run for three seasons. The first season adapted the entirety of the first book in Liu's trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, as well as borrowing bits from the second and third books: The Dark Forest and Death's End. So we should go forward at a rate of one book per season.
The second and third books in Cixin's series are longer than the first, and fans may wonder how they'll fit everything into two more seasons of TV. But again, the first season already reached forward into the later books, so hopefully Benioff, Weiss and Woo can wrangle everything together.
Game of Thrones veterans Liam Cunningham and John Bradley talk 3 Body Problem
Before 3 Body Problem, Benioff and Weiss created Game of Thrones for HBO, and they brought a bunch of cast members over with them. That includes Liam Cunningham, who played empathetic advisor Ser Davos Seaworth on Game of Thrones and who plays the iron-willed intelligence officer Thomas Wade on 3 Body Problem. “He’s incredibly pragmatic,” Cunningham told Deadline about his character. “When people say something can’t be done, he says ‘The San-Ti have done it, we can do it.’ And he says on the show, even if it doesn’t work, it will knock us forward a couple of generations. He employs people who say they’re good at this stuff and he will complain bitterly if they’re not delivering, because that’s what they’re supposed to do. That’s his pragmatism, it’s a bullheaded pragmatism.”
The San-Ti are an extraterrestrial race currently making their way towards Earth, and it's Wade's job to make sure they're stopped. To that end, he's going to cryogenically freeze himself and unthaw himself once every year to make sure all of his plans are progressing as he wants them to. “His attitude won’t change at all. He’s a rhino and he will ‘only advance,’” Cunningham said.
Another Game of Thrones castaway is John Bradley, who played the sarcastic snack food mogul Jack Rooney, who's nothing like Bradley's mild-mannered Game of Thrones character Samwell Tarly. “I think that realized halfway through Game of Thrones that I was nothing like that character,” Bradley told The Hollywood Reporter. “Dan Weiss said I was so diametrically opposed to the characters I was playing, and I think they could see that I was being put into that character bracket a little bit too easily, and they knew that I could do more than that. They gave me this chance to show a different side of myself, and I was very flattered by the characterization of Jack, in a way, as somebody that’s very comfortable with himself and very confident and very happy with his place in the world. I was happy to show that side of myself to the world.”
"Hopefully it’ll be a bit of a reset in terms of how I’m seen by people and being able to play more confident characters,” says Bradley. “David and Dan, it feels like they kick-started the entire first act of my career with Game of Thrones. And they kicked off the entire second [act] with this."
All eight episodes of 3 Body Problem are streaming now on Netflix. We don't know when the next season may come out, but at least we know the cast and crew has the green light.
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