To get the obvious things out of the way, it is the right of the The Witcher's showrunners to interpret the source material as they see fit. It's just as obvious, however, that audience perception is what determines the show's success. For better or worse, that is the model we in the the West live in, and what Netflix uses in determining the funding of future projects. Season 1 was a huge hit. The showrunners did their job. Additional seasons were funded. Season 2 slipped in terms of commercial success, but another season had already been budgeted and was underway. We are now post-Season 3, and the people have spoken. It's a low point. Season 4 is not confirmed.
Over the three seasons of The Witcher, cinematography has been consistent, personnel consistent, budget consistent, special effects consistent, and the story generally consistent with the novels. So why the downturn in success?
Following Source Material
The first and largest complaint issued by the internets is that the series doesn't follow the source material—Sapkowski's six novels and two collections. I've read these books and can say this is not definitively true. Certainly there are discrepancies, and certainly things happen on screen that did not happen in the books. But by and large the two stories follow the same idea: girl with undiscovered powers is chased by various groups, from human to wizardly and beyond, each wanting to take advantage of her. The tough hero with special powers to fight monsters does what he can to teach and protect Ciri while sorting out his own relationship troubles with a brilliant female magician in a land at war. That is super high level. But even at the next level of detail, and the level after that, the series still follows the books. We need to go deeper to prove this.
One thing the series follows very closely upon the books is Sapkowski's penchant for focusing on individual scenes rather than the wider picture. As a result, there is a gap for readers between how much they know about the main characters versus the land they live in and traverse. Nilfgardians, Redanians, elves, etc., those are just names flying around with only minimal relationship to one another. They lack the color of Starks, Lannisters, Baratheons, etc., for example. When one of the names in The Witcher attacks another name, it doesn't mean a lot to the reader because they haven't been given the backdrop or lore to appreciate it. The exact same can be said of most names/places in the tv series. In one episode I counted thirteen places named by characters, none of which I could tell you anything about save cardinal direction and likely they too want to capture Ciri. So yes, there are kings and queens and the like, but their motivations and quarrels have little depth given how little time is spent developing them. It follows that when dramatic scenes occur involving a clash of names/places, the viewer is little affected. It's just drama pushing the real focus of the story (Geralt, Yennefer, or Ciri) in new directions. This is how Sapkowski handled the source material, and the showrunners of the tv series do precisely the same.
In fact, I think there is a strong argument to be made that the show sometimes tries to be too faithful to the books—to its own detriment. For example, the show tries to translate the page time of side characters to the screen, and by doing so spread themselves too thin. Ten episodes, while equaling four or five movies, is still not enough time to map a book 1:1 to the screen. This means any time given to secondary characters not only detracts from screen time for the main characters but likewise muddies the waters of plot by having more crammed in. Things become too disparate and the impact of the story is diffused. A great example is the death of Riance. He occupied significant screen time in Season 2 (and is a critical part of the novels). He is almost ignored in Season 3, however, and suddenly dies a bloody death. The scene appears and is over before the viewer blinks an eye. Grab a peanut and you miss it. By contrast, the viewer spends more time watching (a horrendously acted) Fringilla get drunk while being held prisoner. Which is too bad. Riance's death scene had Game-of-Thrones level of potential for Important Character Death had it gotten the attention it deserved. It is instead squeezed among scenes of secondary import, and over before it began.
The better choice for the television writers would have been to drive a golden path through Sapkowski's books, making hard decisions to elide certain characters—yes, characters that some readers may have wanted to see on screen. But in turn they would have had more quality scenes/time with the book's main characters, the reason most people are watching to begin with. As it stands, the series has too many ingredients, and thus the stew lacks singular flavor. The video game The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt understood this. Netflix did not.
And lastly, a simple and obvious point regarding the source material. There are elements that do not translate well to a tv series. First and foremost is the fact Sapkowski sets aside characters or places for whole books at a time. In tv terms, this means Ciri, Yennefer, and others would not appear on screen for a whole season. From a business perspective it's tough to keep the same actors employed without guaranteeing them consistent screen time. It's in this manner I think plot choices around Ciri and Yennfer's characters were made that did not align with the novels but kept the series cohesive from a personnel standpoint. This put more onus on the writing team to juggle character balls. They failed in several ways (more later), but cannot be overly faulted for injecting Ciri or Yennefer where they do not appear in the books simply for the sake of maintaining personnel.
Wokeness
The second major criticism leveraged by the internets at The Witcher tv series are the DEI/woke elements. Before offering my own criticism in this area, I would defend some pieces. I typically agree with people who say that Tolkien-esque Medieval villages need gingers and pasties. But if there was a fantasy world to inject other walks of life, it's The Witcher. Going back to what I said earlier, Sapkowski's focus is on individual characters and scenes. The ethnic backdrop and demographics have minor impact on story save side bits of racism and enmity among humans, elves, dwarves, etc. Where race and culture are key to understanding Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, etc., such is rarely the case in The Witcher. It's definitively more heroic than epic. Yes, one generic power fights another generic power, and Geralt needs to pay attention to survive. But the demographics of these generic powers occupy a blurry backdrop rather than sharp foreground. The people could be any color/sexual orientation/whatever and nothing about Geralt's story changes. The elves are just humans with pointy ears for goodness sake. And so while I think Sapkowski's books would have been more successful had he put nuance into his setting, he didn't. Thus having all shapes and sizes and colors doesn't really matter in the tv series, either. I was more concerned about the poorness of acting of certain characters rather than their skin color.
But what is right to criticize about the DEI elements is the manner in which they were included and the blindness to audience. As a baseline, almost all the secondary characters are token: one Asian female, one black male, one fat black female, one homosexual, one bi-sexual, etc., etc. It's so token as to be non-coincidental. It's forced. I have not studied the sales of Sapkowski's novels or The Witcher video games, but my assumption is that the majority of readers and players are young white men who like heroic fantasy. I do not believe this demographic is a hotbed of hard left politics interested in token representation. It's not the target audience to force extreme liberal values on. This is absolutely not to say said young men are intolerant or disrespectful, only that it's likely the majority of people who consume Witcher tv content want the story as they saw it on the page or video game, i.e. a Medieval-esque world with European culture at the core. The tv show does provide this in terms of setting, but it's clear diversity was shoehorned into the actors' demographics. Have you ever tried to force something on somebody? It doesn't usually work well, the same as Season 3's attempt at DEI on their audience. After all, who goes to a satanist convention and expects to sell a lot of bibles? The Witcher's producers were equally hopeless selling DEI.
The Writing
The third piece of criticism leveraged by the internets, and the criticism I find not only most justified but also most impacting on the show's decline, is the writing. By writing, I refer to dialogue and plotting. Dialogue in Season 1 was acceptable. It wasn't going to set the world on fire (as shows like Peaky Blinders, Mad Men, True Detective, and others often do), but it got the job done with occasional flashy bits. Season 3 was wooden, overt, soulless. It was painful watching some of the actors and actresses trying to get emotion out of empty lines. Henry Cavill and Anya Chalotra, for example, were visibly twitching in the silence following a mundane line. Sapkowski, or at least the English translation of Sapkowski, is not exactly exciting, but even he could summon some energy from his characters' words.
Plotting is likewise to blame, at least partially. To be clear, the Witcher novels have little action. Peaks of excitement exist, but there are more valleys of conversation and philosophizing. But without the luxury of hundreds of pages of such waffle, the potential for the tv show's success fell squarely on its writers' ability to speed through Sapkowski's navel-gazing and cut to the chase—literally and figuratively—of the scenes fans wanted to see, i.e. Geralt doing witcher stuff. This is what made Sapkowski's short stories so successful, and it's also what made the video game so successful. They unleashed the potential of the Witcher concept; dude who is good with swords and drinks elixirs to fight monsters in morally gray scenarios—that's the draw. Season 1, by embedding elements of the short stories, accomplished this. Season 3 does little if anything to realize the potential. To be clear, this is a repetition of the earlier point that producers/writers tried to include too much source material, spreading the show thin. They needed to find ways to make Geralt stand out in order for the show to be a success. They failed. (“You had one job...”) And if I'm being entirely fair, it's the reason Sapkowski's Witcher novels are not as good as his Witcher short stories. Like adding water to vodka, he diluted the fire of his own product. (For a Pole that is a true insult, but I trust his rolling in millions of dollars soothes.)
Miscellaneous
A few, quick points before ending this critique.
Some people complain that Season 3 ended on a bad note for Geralt (injured and weak), and therefore did not live up to the character's potential as a “hero”, not to mention was a middle finger sending off Henry Cavill. I would defend this. It was the third season, aka the “bridge” to the fourth and final fifth seasons. The good guy is typically defeated in a bridge book so he can rise to defeat the villain in the final books, yes? Moreover, the scene of Geralt's defeat follows the books relatively faithfully. It isn't a resentful adios to Cavill. Again, I think it's the showrunner's inability to give viewers more of Geralt prior to that final scene which is really at fault here.
I am far from a film critic, but the acting from some of the secondary characters is visibly bad even to my laymen's eyes. Poor dialogue doesn't help, but beyond that several of the minor characters felt like high school students in front of the camera. The actress who plays Milva, for example, is terrible—Keanu Reeves in Dracula terrible. The blame here I think falls not only on the actors and actresses, but likewise the casting team. When innocents like myself notice, it's got to be bad.
And one last obvious point, one that perhaps not too many people are willing to say, but I will say it. One of the reasons for Game of Thrones popularity was the consistency of blood and boobs. It didn't happen every, single episode but often enough to keep human, primitive, titillated asses in the seats. Witcher Season 1 delivered this atavistic formula, subsequently setting a bar for expectations. Season 2 moved away from this formula, and Season 3 almost abandoned it. Not only did it disappoint viewers looking for Season One's level of “grit”, it also made the show's delivery inconsistent. People came looking for what had already been given them, and they got something else. I'm not saying this is objectively a bad thing, but again: consider who your audience is and what you've lead them to expect. People who read the books and played the games got consistent experiences, so why not the tv series? The showrunners don't seem to understand product management in this regard.
Conclusion
In summary the woes of the Witcher tv series are to be placed in the hands of a few people: 1) the producers who made poor strategic decisions, 2) the writers who executed poorly on the strategy, and 3) Sapkowksi for writing a mediocre heroic fantasy that failed to capture what made his short stories captivating. While a decent job is done adapting the books to the screen by Netflix, there is failure at the basic level of delivering a consistent product, quality dialogue, focused plotting, and overall decent acting. Better dialogue would have certainly made the series more bearable, but distilling the elements of Sapkowski's story down to the bare elements of Geralt, Ciri, and Yennefer's tales, then telling it through the lens of Geralt would have been enough to give fans what they wanted without sacrificing a lot of the DEI stuff that producers wanted. Diluting this core story with so many secondary elements and without a nuanced backdrop to pin it all on was a poor, strategic decision, and one that is now playing out in poor audience scores. CD Projekt Red, in adapting the books into the game Witcher III: The Wild Hunt, understood this. They also did not adapt Sapkowski's story 100% faithfully. But they understood their audience and gave them the experience of what made the witcher concept interesting. The game has millions upon millions in sales and is still considered by many the greatest video game of all time almost a decade later. It's fair to say they were rewarded for their decisions.
Unless I hear news that the writing team has been replaced, or that the tv series has decided to take a new direction in the wake of Season 3's failures, I won't be back to watch the rest of what the showrunners produce—and that's if they get the greenlight for another season.
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