It’s been a long time since sci-fi was truly esoteric — the kind that was more science than fiction, and that explored ideas beyond our understanding. In a time when a general audience member has a passing knowledge of string theory, this has proven to be more and more difficult. But in 2008, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem got pretty close.

An ambitious, multi-generational saga that followed scientists who sought to fend off the slow invasion of Earth by a race of technologically superior aliens, The Three-Body Problem took its name from an unsolvable mystery in orbital mechanics. As dry as the prose (and as thin as its characters) could sometimes get, The Three-Body Problem was also a revelation: a truly cerebral piece of science fiction whose plot was largely driven by its science.

For this reason, Liu’s Three-Body Trilogy, as the franchise has come to be called, was given one of the most daunting labels in Hollywood: unadaptable. But darn it, if David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo aren’t going to do their best to try to adapt it.

For most of their life, one thing haunted Jane Schoenbrun.

“Between when I was a kid and watched Twin Peaks for the first time and when the show got rebooted in 2017, I just had recurring nightmares about it,” Schoenbrun tells Inverse. The original David Lynch series featured such a “dark and disturbing ending that it almost felt like an assault of some kind or unresolved trauma.”

Twin Peaks eventually finally found a resolution with its revival miniseries, The Return, but fans like Schoenbrun had to wait a good 20 years for any of that, and it clearly took its toll on the filmmaker.

Television has a way of getting under our skin — especially with its endings. A good series finale can provide the type of closure that real life almost never does, while an unsatisfying one leaves emotional scars when things don’t wrap up as neatly as we’d hoped. That’s the underlying theme of Schoenbrun’s upcoming horror movie, I Saw the TV Glow, a sophomore effort that was the talk of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.