Netflix adapts ‘3 Body Problem’ epic
It’s been a bad year for scientists — on television, at least. Remember that frozen pile of researchers from “True Detective: Night Country”? Well, that’s just an appetizer for the cosmic head-scratcher “3 Body Problem,” based on a three-novel series from China, streaming on Netflix and created by the production team behind “Game of Thrones.”
Ambitious, globespanning and insistently loud, it follows a team of frightened investigators looking into a possible explanation for an epidemic of suicides among the world’s most brilliant minds. Suffice it to say, the answer lies “out there” in all the most cosmic ways.
This is not the first adaptation of “Problem.” A Chinese-made miniseries has gained a global audience. Peacock recently announced that it would be streaming a subtitled version of that series, simply titled “3 Body.” The Chinese adaptation runs 30 episodes. The Netflix series has eight.
› Now streaming on AMC+ and Sundance Now, the U.K. import “The Long Shadow” returns to mid-1970s Yorkshire, when a serial killer, eventually identified as Peter Sutcliffe, stalked cities including Leeds, eventually taking a toll of at least 13 women.
Look for Toby Jones (“Harry Potter”; “Detectorists”) as DCS Dennis Hoban. The series does a credible job of evoking the period gloom of deindustrialized Britain. It also goes out of its way to humanize the victims, including prostitutes. A long opening scene follows the children of the first murdered woman who anxiously await her return from her nocturnal stroll and are waiting for her bus to return when police arrive with the grim news.
A hard-working character actor with understated depths, Jones may be familiar to fans of the never-ending U.K. procedural “Midsomer Murders” as one of the first medical examiners. He also stars in “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,” a true-life drama about an episode that rocked U.K. politics just last year, which arrives on PBS on April 7.
› Hulu streams the documentary “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told.” It recalls the legendary street parties that began in Atlanta as modest college cookouts and eventually, over the course of the 1980s and ’90s, became gatherings of thousands, springtime events that shut down parts of the city, but also helped identify Atlanta as a cultural mecca.