3 Body Problem’s creators learned all the wrong lessons from Game of Thrones

polygon.com:

Adaptations aren’t easy, and few people in Hollywood know that better than David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. The writing and showrunning duo ran the gamut on HBO’s Game of Thrones, starting off with five seasons of a better and more faithful translation to the screen than anyone could have imagined, before the series slowly went off the rails when they ran out of material. The pair’s new show, 3 Body Problem, proves that they learned a lot from their failures on Game of Thrones — but its struggles also prove that no two adaptations are alike.

Everything about the approach Benioff and Weiss, along with co-creator Alexander Woo, took on 3 Body Problem seems like a direct response to their issues in the back half of their previous show. While Game of Thrones had a number of problems in its later seasons, including a fundamental lack of time and space to tell its story, the biggest was likely that it lacked some of the most important characters from George R.R. Martin’s books. Namely: young Griff.

As the fan lore now goes, Benioff and Weiss didn’t want to include Griff in the series because he didn’t get introduced until A Dance of Dragons, the fifth book in the series. This would have meant that, to include him in the show, he likely would have hopped in around seasons 4 or 5, and the showrunners didn’t want to introduce a new key character that late in the game. According to fan speculation, though, Griff is likely an important enough character that his inclusion is necessary to make the books’ story feel complete, making his exclusions feel like one of the biggest issues with the show’s last few seasons. While none of this is technically confirmed, especially not the part about Griff’s importance to the conclusion of Martin’s book series, it isn’t particularly hard to believe.

Seemingly to avoid a situation like this again, Benioff and Weiss took a very different approach to adapting Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past series. Each of the three books in the series