I recently finished the trilogy and I've got to say... Even though this clip looks neat I've never had less faith in an adaptation of anything. Particularly with Benioff and Weiss at the helm.
If GoT taught us anything, if they have Original Source MaterialTM to adapt, they do a decent job. It's when they are left to improvise that things get awful.
I would get seriously more skeptical if the people in charge of Foundation got their hands on this adaptation tho.
The way they decided to dice up the source material for GoT even before they ran out of books was the most jarring thing about reading that series. George gave them a meticulously detailed account of things and they tweaked it a lot. At least that series was grounded in historical fantasy. So there was rules that needed to be followed and George was there to guide them. If GRRM wasnt there from the start they could have gone off the rails from the beginning.
The Three Body Problem is way more abstract idea wise and extremely dry in terms of character interaction. And is Liu gonna be able to help them to steer the ship the same way GRRM did? I don't think so. Right off the bat these guys are being left to their own devices for a lot of this story. I read an interview where they mentioned changing the story to fit a wider audience. And looking at the two trailers, I already noticed major changes that just don't make sense. Skepticism is gonna be at an all time high for me.
I watched and loved GoT just as much as anybody. I read the books and quickly figured out why they took precedent over the show, even for the good years. I've already read Three Body Problem. On my first read through I thought this was the greatest scifi trilogy ever written. I'm not ready for someone to come and make a shitty TV adaptation of it. Especially those two.
For me it was how they lit the show on fire when they thought they'd be moving on to bigger and better things. "If we can't run this show, we'll make it so that nobody can".
For real - in a vacuum (ha), it’s… passable, but mostly just the parts that involve Empire… and it has to be mentioned that those additions were barely present in the source work. I find most of the rest of the storylines to be unengaging and nonsensical, and the entire vibe of the show series is substantially different from what Asimov was clearly going for.
The Chinese adaptation by Tencent is available for free on YouTube. It does a generally good job. Episode 6 seems heavily censored, but it is otherwise a sensible adaptation of the original.
Netflix could have easily built on that and improve on it tremendously. There are parts in the Tencent adaptation that are plain bad (e.g., Evans).
However, if seems that they went on a different route. I hope that this "teaser" is not a faithful representation of the final product.