– The intelligent event series is back – with these two epics
“Game of Thrones” was the last television epic. Two series are now running that are being compared to the fantasy masterpiece: “3 Body Problem” and “Shōgun”.
Published today at 7:00 p.m
The Netflix production “3 Body Problem” is one of two series that are currently being celebrated as the successor to “Game of Thrones”: Jack Rooney (John Bradley) with a VR headset whose technology no one understands.
Photo: Netflix
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The two series couldn’t be more different. “3 Body Problem” (Netflix) is the adaptation of the award-winning science fiction trilogy by Cixin Liu, published in German under the title “The Three Suns”. “Shōgun” (Disney+) adapts the influential novel of the same name by James Clavell about the samurai around 1600.
Nevertheless, they have similarities: both series are based on thick templates, take place in locations in Asia, have a complicated plot and confuse the audience.
In “3 Body Problem” the characters also enter virtual worlds in which a huge army is whirling through the air.
Photo: Netflix
Precisely because they don’t take anyone for a fool, both stories are celebrated as series events. Two intelligent epics at once, both of which come close to “Game of Thrones”.
Hardly any report can do without this comparison, even if it is slightly exaggerated. In the case of “3 Body Problem,” it’s up to the creators themselves: David Benioff and DB Weiss spent a decade of their lives as “Game of Thrones” showrunners. They read the 1,000 pages of “The Three Suns” on a long-haul flight. They finished practically at the same time and said to themselves: We have to do this.
Anyone who has read the trilogy can hardly imagine how this would work on a television screen. The Chinese author Cixin Liu comes up with ingenious scenarios without having to deploy an entire fleet of spaceships.
This is what the brilliant researchers look like on Netflix: Marlo Kelly as Tatiana and Eiza González as Auggie Salazar in “3 Body Problem”.
Photo: Netflix
The trilogy (and the series) begins at the time of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Researcher Ye Wenjie witnesses her father being executed. His crime: the use of Western science. She herself is recruited to work in a facility where an extraterrestrial signal arrives at some point. Aliens knock and ask Ye Wenjie not to answer, otherwise they would prepare an invasion. But the researcher, deeply disappointed in the human species, sends a signal.
What followed also presented the showrunners of “Game of Thrones” with greater challenges. How do you show a five-dimensional object moving through a three-dimensional space? How on earth do you explain to the Netflix audience what the three-body problem is all about?
The aliens can be seen in various forms in the science fiction series – but not in the way we know them from space films like “Star Wars”.
Photo: Netflix
The answer is American-pragmatic. The series omits, adds poetry, rearranges. The series creators met with Cixin Liu, he agreed to the changes. The ideas were important to him, they say, but from his point of view the characters could still be developed.
“3 Body Problem” does just that, inventing a team of brilliant young researchers in Oxford. They look like they could star in a soap opera about a start-up. Luckily, an unsightly chain-smoking investigator comes along.
But Cixin Liu’s ideas have survived: “3 Body Problem” remains a series of speculative narratives that fold our imagination into new dimensions and suggest ideas that seem like a mix of a magic trick and a brainteaser. At the same time, the series shows humanity that has to pull itself together in the face of an impending threat. Read: climate catastrophe.
A computer made of human bodies – the idea comes straight from Cixin Liu’s novels.
Photo: Netflix
Barack Obama, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are declared fans of the novel trilogy. A certain George RR Martin, creator of “Game of Thrones”, is also one of them. Netflix is already planning a second season, even if the reaction after the first screenings was partly cautious. The verdicts ranged from “confusing” to “slow.”
The makers of “Shōgun” also received criticism. In the series adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 samurai novel, you hear so much Japanese and read so many subtitles that you might as well read the original.
John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) is called “The Barbarian” by the samurai warriors.
Photo: Disney+
In “Shōgun,” the power vacuum in the Japanese warrior nobility around 1600 is complicated by the fact that Catholic and Protestant sailors are fighting each other. The English navigator John Blackthorne is supposed to interrupt the Portuguese trade routes in Japan. But first he has to contend with the samurai, who call him the “barbarian”.
In the USA, the novel shaped the image of Japan for generations. In 1980, a television series starring Richard Chamberlain was produced that didn’t even subtitle the Japanese dialogue. Of course, that’s no longer possible today: the series creators also appointed veteran actor Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays the feudal ruler Yoshii Toranaga, as cultural advisor.
Hiroyuki Sanada plays the ruler Yoshii Toranaga in “Shōgun”, but also worked as a producer and cultural advisor.
Photo: Disney+
Now in “Shōgun” the kimonos are worn correctly and the view shifts away from Western Orientalism: Instead of witnessing how a white man educates an exotic country, we watch how the Japanese react to the uncouth Englishman. Disney+ has a hit with “Shōgun”, the first episode was watched 9 million times when it launched.
“3 Body Problem” and “Shōgun” bring back the intelligent event series. Both titles stand out from the crowd as events and take their complex templates seriously.
In “3 Body Problem” the aliens send a signal to warn humanity.
Photo: Netflix
Where did you last see a scene like the one in “3 Body Problem,” in which we watch an army of millions in a virtual environment simulating a gigantic logic gate, a computer made of human bodies?
The “Shōgun” makers, for their part, had the dialogues in the English-written novel translated into Japanese and given the correct historical form by a playwright. These scenes, in turn, were meticulously given English subtitles. “Shōgun” also thinks we are smart enough.
What connects the two series events most strongly with “Game of Thrones” is that here and there, characters die in extremely violent ways.
“3 Body Problem”, on Netflix. “Shōgun” on Disney+.
Streaming and cinema tipsPascal Blum studied sociology and history and has been a cultural editor since 2014. He mainly reports on films and series and has written a book chapter about Heidi in the film. More info
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