The Witcher (2019)

Written by Hachado on November 3, 2021

I originally watched this in 2019 when it released and was a big fan, the world was captivating and interesting yet bleak and grounded. Such was my interest, I shortly after played all the games and began reading the books, now two years later and with season 2 about to come out I decided it was worth a rewatch.

On my second watch I wasn't quite as impressed, now able to judge the show both as an adaptation of material, characters and stories I was familiar with from other works and also able to better analyse the show as a piece of television in its own right now that I could better understand the quite convoluted plot and timeline.

The Show is an attempt to adapt two collections of short stories that serve as precursors to the main witcher series, these stories are often only loosely connected although are often thematically related and take place over a huge span of time and place.

This could lend itself nicely to an anthology style monster of the week collection with common themes, characters and world building however the The show ambitiously tries to construct a cohesive narrative out of this in 8 episodes and it doesn't really quite work, limited to only 8 episodes so much subtlety and intricacy is lost and that which is there, is often poorly explained. I blamed myself on my initial watch for often being confused at what was happening but now after watching again while familiar with the source material I don't feel the show really does a good job of setting up the political background and bounces from one extreme to another either name dumping with no context or flanderization such as Nilfgaard = Nazis.

I would never expect a Movie or Tv show to be able to capture or match everything from a book series where the only limit is the readers imagination but was very surprised how I much preferred nearly all the voice acting and visual aesthetics of the video games compared to the show, from the creature design to the Nilfgaardian armour to the sense of character I think the games does it all better. The acting here overall isn't great, although I do like Cavil as Geralt.

Overall I still think the first season was decent and I did still enjoy it and hopefully pretends better to come but can't say it particularly succeeds either as an adaption of the first two witcher books or as a particularly well crafted piece of television.