Ever since Game of Thrones took a nosedive off the cliffs of quality in its final seasons, creators and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss haven’t enjoyed the best run of luck.
As well as being lambasted so brutally by the Westeros masses that petitions to remake the entirety of season 8 racked up hundreds of thousands of signatures and found backing from members of the cast, their controversial series Confederate was axed not long after it was announced due to the backlash, before they enjoyed a brief flirtation with Star Wars that ended up going absolutely nowhere.
That places even more pressure on Netflix’s incoming sci-fi series 3 Body Problem as a result, never mind the fact the project has already been languishing in development hell for over a decade. While he obviously couldn’t say much, star and Game of Thrones veteran Liam Cunningham was effusive in his praise for the dynamic duo in an interview with Collider.
“Oh, listen, it’s always the quality of the writing, and these guys, it’s some of the best writing I’ve ever come across in my life. And this is also saying I spent a year and a half with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I’ve done Shakespeare on stage. These boys are absolutely extraordinary, the words they put in an actor’s mouth. And then to go with this – and David’s an enormous fan of the books. I haven’t even read the books. I didn’t read the Game of Thrones books either.
He knows a lot more about it than I do, and I mean it. To tell you the truth, I haven’t told anybody else, I was in serious talks for another project and obviously the boys found out about it, and I got a phone call from David and Dan, they just said, “You’re not doing that. You’re coming with us.” I didn’t even know what the project was, and I just said, “Yeah, okay. I’ll tell the other crowd no.” It could have been a day’s work on the other thing, but when those two call, you run to the clarion call.”
With a January 2024 release date tentatively penciled in, there’s not long to go until we find out if Benioff and Weiss will redeem themselves with episodic excellence, or if 3 Body Problem will become just the latest stick to beat them over the head.