Let me say how much I enjoyed the books and the Chinese TV show.
The Netflix version reminds me that, like Avatar, they're not afraid to change scenes up.
In this case the result seems a bit like Friends, but they're attractive physicists who argue about working for the military industrial complex and don't have threesomes!
Actually, I think it's obvious the American version has removed everything Chinese except the bits the Chinese originally buried in the book to appease censors.
In particular the scenes from the Cultural Revolution are foregrounded at the expense of detailing the character that starts an alien invasion.
The Panama scene was everything I hoped to see, but the opportunities to show phsicists grappling with questions of science has been diminished.
It's not surprising, they've shrunk 30 hours of the Chinese adaptation into eight hours for the Netflix version and ended up covering ground from the second book.
