The sci-fi series 3 Body Problem has soared up the Netflix UK most-watched list since its release last week.
But the new show from Game Of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss was actually ready to arrive on Netflix back in the middle of 2023 – aside from one last-minute addition.
The adaptation of Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin follows a group of scientists who join forces with a detective to save humanity, after an astrophysicist’s decision during the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s has long-lasting consequences.
But according to the showrunners, their first iteration of episode one was missing some details that would have subsequently left viewers a little too in the dark.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, they came up with a new scene to be inserted right near the beginning to help better establish the plot.
The five-minute scene shows Auggie (Eiza González) and Jin (Jess Hong) drinking in a bar, which gives the characters a chance to discuss their careers and the broken state of science, while also giving a sense of their relationship statuses.
In this sequence, they also find out about Vera’s suicide and Auggie’s countdown clock begins.
If the scene weren’t included, it would have only shown the Oxford Five gathering for the funeral with Auggie already seeing her countdown.
The showrunners explained that the Hollywood strikes were the reason it took so long to get the extra scene shot.
“We got the scene written the day before the strike,” Dan Weiss recalled. “It was literally five pages, but we really thought it was worth doing.
“Netflix was great about it. It would have been very easy for them to be like, ’You have a finished show that is ready to air, for us to hold that [for a scene that’s] five minutes of two people in a bar…that it took some fortitude for them to just say, ‘Yeah.’”
Netflix’s head of scripted series Peter Friedlander added: “I want to tell the best version of this story, and if there’s a critical moment that the producers want to capture and we have the time and resources to do it, I want to figure it out with them.”
He added: “They were total professionals, total collaborators and very clear what their vision is. I don’t want the audiences to miss out on that. So it was not a hard decision for me.”
3 Body Problem is currently at number two in Netflix UK’s most watched TV shows, behind Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen.