At the time of this writing the show has a 7.9 rating. I suspect in time this will go down to around 7.2 although personally I think it deserves a 6.
Too harsh? I don't think so. While I didn't hate the show and am not one of those people who need or expect all adaptations to adhere strictly to the source material I think if you are going to make changes in your adaptation they should make sense and make some sort of improvement. This show failed on both scores. The original books by author Cixin Liu were hard sci-fi and brilliant in scope and imagination. The adaptation dumbs down the source material for TV and makes changes to appease the political viewers. None of this is an improvement. All it achieves is it takes everything that made the books so different from everything else out there and turns it into the same kind of Hollywood tripe that's a dime a dozen these days.
Too harsh? I don't think so. While I didn't hate the show and am not one of those people who need or expect all adaptations to adhere strictly to the source material I think if you are going to make changes in your adaptation they should make sense and make some sort of improvement. This show failed on both scores. The original books by author Cixin Liu were hard sci-fi and brilliant in scope and imagination. The adaptation dumbs down the source material for TV and makes changes to appease the political viewers. None of this is an improvement. All it achieves is it takes everything that made the books so different from everything else out there and turns it into the same kind of Hollywood tripe that's a dime a dozen these days.