Luke Wenzel

First off I am a huge fan of the book series and have read through it twice so I am very familiar with the source material. With that being said, I am going to be rather harsh on this adaptation. 3 Body Problem is a show that is good enough that it won't be cancelled and good enough to be slightly entertaining however it does a huge disservice to the quality of the book series. If this was your first exposure to the 3 Body Problem series you would just think "its an okay show, not great but not bad" and you will probably have no interest in reading the books or diving further. In my opinion, that is what makes this show such a travesty. It's just good enough to make people think that all the hype around the book series was just that, hype and nothing more. 3 Body Problem, suffers greatly from the quality of the dialogue writing and the acting. Half the cast is either horribly miscast or is just genuinely bad. Jess Hong as Jin Cheng does a great job but outside of her I think the performances are all poor. Eiza Gonzalez in particular stands out as being hard to watch. Her acting is unbelievable, shallow, and immersion breaking, and her decreased screen time throughout the series is an indicator that the production team understood this. In terms of plot, the writers have dumbed down the plot for a general audience but in doing so they have stripped it of its appeal. 3 Body Problem is the hardest of HARD sci-fi and this show is 8th grade earth science class. The tiny changes here and there from the source material have really added up to strip the series of it's core. I would say you could fire the writers, hire new ones, kill off Auggie, and maybe turn things around but to be honest that is not what I want. I would prefer for this to go gently into the night as another failed book adaptation so that at some point down the line we can have another team take a crack at it in the future. The only reason I am giving this 2 stars instead of 1 is that If you had never heard anything about 3 Body Problem then maybe you will like it to some extent. I would implore you however to stop watching after episode 1 and go and read the book so you don't have this masterpiece of Sci-Fi series ruined by an at best mediocre, soulless, cash grab of a show.