The show should be a celebration, a statement, a home run swing, and its narrative architecture reflects that ambition. Instead, its style is anonymous, ancillary, the work of a corporate author rather than an artistic intelligence.

these scenes in the 1960s and 1970s function as flashbacks, but they are also the best scenes in the show. This is partially because Tseng’s performance is easily the strongest in the series, but it’s also because it’s clear the filmmakers have given these portions of the show a distinctive look and feel to connote them as flashbacks. Vast denuded forests, new construction that already feels like it’s about to rust, the too-bright sun making the very air of cold hallways visible—it’s a tremendously compelling world, raw, sad, even darkly funny.

To some extent, the animations in the game need to feel uncanny. We have to differentiate them from the reality of the show, but we also have to believe that the characters themselves can’t differentiate them from their own realities. It’s a tricky predicament for the show to figure out—what does The Real look like?—but it’s a problem they’ve largely deferred. And the visual blankness, the frictionless animated splendor of the game, seeps into the rest of the series. In the game and out of it, the visual effects on this show—many of which are meant to be literally global spectacles of shock and awe—have the chintzy sheen of the Sci-Fi Channel space operas Moore was writing against in 2003. Sights meant to elicit gasps from our characters look like demo reels from startup VFX companies, at best, and demo reels from defense contractors at worst.

One thing we learn early on about the aliens is that they cannot lie. Because they can’t lie like humans do, they also can neither produce nor understand fiction. They have a complete multidimensional understanding of the universe, but they cannot fancy it otherwise than it is. They demonstrate technical capability but no real imagination. All content, no style.

Networks and streamers want shows to look “good,” but that designation is less about quality or imaginative production design than it is about a set of visual tropes that read to well-trained viewers as “good.”

Think of the Instagram filter aesthetics of Ozark, the dark and oversaturated “Netflix look” of The Sandman, the tinned Fincherisms of A Murder at the End of the World—Peak TV prestige style can be a copy or a caricature of itself, but it’s also a wan reflection of beloved texts of the prior age. Aping the signature look of Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or True Detective is a way to activate a set of coded cues for viewers to notice and approve. Such a style distracts distractible viewers from the thinness or derivativeness of the show they’re watching. If it didn’t look like that, they wouldn’t care, or worse, they wouldn’t feel that they should care.

Many of the most acclaimed series of the past few years have been distinguished by their singular televisual styles. The Bear’s fast cuts and extreme close-ups sutured to dad rock deep cuts of the mid-aughts; Shogun’s anamorphic lenses and natural light and swirly bokeh—or blur—around the edges; Succession’s nauseating handheld and gray landscapes; I’m a Virgo’s ramshackle practical effects and forced perspective; Euphoria’s loud and hallucinatory “emotional realism.”

3 Body Problem feels allergic to this kind of cohesive televisual vision. There’s so much to do, so many characters to introduce, so much science to condense and explain, so many mysteries to investigate and unveil, so many questions to ask and answers to complicate, so much book to dutifully adapt. In the moments when we notice the show making a visual or a stylistic choice, they tend to be strictly utilitarian: The scenes in Mongolia mark a transition in time, nearly every pop music cue thuddingly references what’s happening onscreen, two eyes merge into one inside the headset when the video game begins, the capillaries in one scientist’s eyeballs seize into a glowing, ticking clock that warps and deranges everything she (and we) sees. Because these scattered touches nearly all denote transitions out of the show’s present or serve to emphasize points or themes within it, that means that the show’s baseline is a kind of deliberate stylelessness, a boilerplate reality.

This show, for all its many fine performances and thoughtful narrative contraptions, feels processed, not created; professionally managed, not imagined.