Netflix's The Witcher somehow makes a show featuring monsters and naked wizards boring

Vox

Henry Cavill's turn as Geralt on the Netflix fantasy series based on Andrzej Sapkowski's fantasy novels is one of the show's bright spots. Yet The Witcher doesn't work, says Alex Abad-Santos. "The only thing that this show appears capable of is retreating into tired fantasy tropes complete with dark warlords, gratuitous nudity (predominantly female), and chaotic evil women that could, in a moment of heated anger, obliterate the world. It’s as if D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, clearly out of steam after showrunning that final season of Game of Thrones, found a way to sell off their unused, undercooked ideas under the table to the powers that produce The Witcher. He adds that The Witcher is "perfect if you want to create a show with very good-looking women doing lots of fun, topless magic and lots of mystical robes with chest cutouts. Aside from this mystic boob-show loophole, it’s actually the lack of imagination or ingenuity is the true letdown of The Witcher. The biggest of the show’s problems is its weak writing. From Geralt’s adventures, to the kingdom of Cintra, to Yennefer, there are myriad characters who exist just to talk story to each other and the audience. The exposition leads to a plodding pace out of the gate, and it also undercuts any kind of emotional impact that Geralt’s loneliness, or Ciri’s destiny, or Yennefer’s upheaval might yield. The easiest comparison to make here is, unsurprisingly, Game of Thrones. The Witcher’s dependence on high fantasy tropes with ostentatiously F-bomb-laden antiquated English mixed in is pure Game of Thrones, which has become the model for fantasy TV series aimed at adults. And no doubt Netflix is hoping that fans searching for a GoT replacement might forgive The Witcher’s faults and stick with it. But Game of Thrones, even in its horrendous last season, always told stories with greater meaning and ramifications than simplistic character-based quests."

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• The Witcher is a lot more fun once it stops pretending it's the next Game of Thrones: "The show’s pilot goes heavy on Westeros’ more meme-worthy aspects—swords, blood, gratuitous nudity, all suspended in a thick morass of 'serious' moral ambiguity—giving every initial impression of having been taken in fully by this hindbrain-hitting surface illusion of easy genre success," says William Hughes. "What else are we to make of a series that opens with its monotone antihero of a protagonist—still awash in monster blood from his latest, flashily acrobatic kill—being led into an enchanted garden filled with nubile, nude, unspeaking women, while a pompous wizard mumbles backstory, exposition, and threats? When that same episode ends by intercutting between a brutal massacre, some ugly examples of mob mentality, and a full-on medieval mass suicide montage, the series begins to take on a tone verging on deliberate parody. Do you want Serious Fantasy TV? Rest assured, The Witcher screams, at full volume and directly into your face: This is some Serious F*cking Fantasy TV. But a closer look reveals this whole opening salvo as mostly bluster; it’s not hard to imagine some Netflix executive scribbling down notes on the show’s pilot, passing them to showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, and watching anxiously as she evaluated suggestions like 'More boobs and throat stabbings, please.' But these growing pains mostly subside after the first, overly grim episode to reveal a far more interesting show—albeit one with its own, more honestly come by flaws."
• The Witcher slowly but surely finds itself a fantastical slice of bloody, schlocky fun for those who stick round: "The Witcher’s sluggish pacing and structural issues in its first half are beyond just the commitment of time," says James Whitbrook. "They create a layer of impenetrability that makes its main characters difficult to connect to, or necessarily care about, as much as we should by the time they begin to dissipate. These issues also impede the audience’s understanding of the flow of the wider plot arcs of the show, to a point of confusion, a decision as needless as it was bewildering. And even if these problems were just about asking a bit too much of your time? That is still a grave error to make. There are plenty of other excellent shows around right now people could watch in this age of peak TV that just being good enough, as The Witcher eventually is, is not going to be a compelling reason for some people to sit around waiting to get to that point. All that said, if you are willing to sit through those trudging opening episodes, punctuated by a cool fight here or an intriguing character scene there, The Witcher slowly but surely finds itself a fantastical slice of bloody, schlocky fun."
• The Witcher's failings show what makes The Mandalorian so strong: "Like The Mandalorian, The Witcher mostly consists of episodic adventures, as Geralt gets embroiled in the schemes of powerful men and women who want to use his significant skills for their own purposes," says Samantha Nelson. "That dynamic works well with The Mandalorian’s short, laser-focused episodes, which keep the spotlight on the title character, with occasional scenes dedicated to Baby Yoda’s adorable antics. The Witcher’s episodes are an hour long at minimum, and they also follow the stories of two other protagonists: the ambitious sorceress Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) and Ciri (Freya Allen), a fierce young princess on the run from the Nilfgaardians seeking Geralt’s protection. These three storylines are almost entirely disconnected through the first half of the show’s eight-episode first season, though Geralt is repeatedly told that Ciri is connected to him through the powerful force of destiny. As a result, it seems both strange and yet inconsequential when one of the triad disappears for a full episode. While Game of Thrones’ large cast and sprawling setting meant many main characters didn’t interact for long periods of time, sharp writing and acting and a strong supporting cast ensured that their individual scenes felt weighty. But The Witcher’s protagonists still feel thinly sketched, with too much time devoted to clunky exposition, or building up even thinner minor characters who are meant to be important later."
• The Witcher is supposed to be inspire wonder, but it's mostly confusing: "In a vacuum, they all hold potential," says Brandon Katz. "Geralt is our badass protagonist who kills mythological beasts both familiar and terrifyingly new; Ciri is a young royal from a kingdom under siege forced to survive on her own; and Yennefer is a powerless and abused woman with a hump on her back who is soon introduced to a world of great magic. But The Witcher races through much of the context surrounding their situations and the early events that set their plots in motion to the point of confusion. Character names, kingdoms, allegiances and betrayals, romantic entanglements, hidden bloodlines, power and politics all come rushing out like candy from a pillow case on Halloween."
• The Witcher only works when it's not taking itself seriously: "When The Witcher is taking itself seriously, it's fairly bad," says Daniel Fienberg. "It aspires to be lofty high fantasy and instead becomes almost endless exposition and silly names. It's the kind of far-flung mystical reach that the characters in The Magicians might find themselves accidentally transported to, only to spend an episode or two standing around making fun of everything. Any attempt to invest on a human or emotional level with the characters or their circumstances is completely pointless and that becomes rather frustrating when episodes stretch well past an hour apiece. I've probably said this a dozen times this year and I won't hesitate to say it again in the future: Netflix, you've got to make your creators edit. If episodes of The Sopranos and The Wire rarely reached an hour, episodes of your pulp fantasy pastiche can surely come in at 50 minutes apiece. Anyway, though…When The Witcher isn't taking itself seriously? It's reasonably fun. Fortunately, it's not taking itself seriously a lot of the time."
• The Witcher lacks tonal consistency: "This is a show with moments of drama and of gruesome violence cut through with a glancing humor that too often feels tossed-off and out-of-place in the world the show has created," says Daniel D'Addario. "The show’s dramatic sensibility is intense and indulgent, crafting action sequences whose length bulks out episodes past hourlong running times. Its comic sensibility is puerile and a bit sarcastic. Indeed, Henry Cavill’s Witcher, a hunter of supernatural beings, and his frequent scene partner, Joey Batey’s jester and bard Jaskier, can feel like a TV pairing less serendipitously unlikely than discordant — a regular Jon Snow and Butt-Head."
• The Witcher would benefit from commercial breaks: "This is the first TV show I’ve ever seen that would actually be better with commercial breaks," says Darren Franich. "The goofy syndicated fantasy of yesteryear had to have a brisk pace, building every 12 minutes to an act-breaking cliffhanger. The Witcher fully embraces the endless-movie layout of the worst Blank Check streaming TV. At the end of the series premiere, someone tells Allen’s Princess Ciri that Geralt is her destiny. In episode 5, people are still telling her that Geralt is her destiny. I assume they will meet in the season finale. Alas, my destiny is to never watch this borefest ever again."
• The show looks great, the production is impeccable, but the storyline is incomprehensible: "The Witcher is baffling and so so hard to make heads or tails of when it comes to its incredibly complicated plot and intricate world," says Jessica Mason. "It’s trying very hard to be the 'next Game of Thrones' but forgets that GoT introduced us to Westeros slowly and didn’t pile on massive amounts of lore and made-up words and species in the pilot. It made us care about people first, and The Witcher isn’t very good at that."
• The Witcher is the weirdest show Netflix has ever done
• How showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich dealt with The Witcher's range of tones: "From the very beginning, obviously, we have to decide what the series is, what it's going to look like, what's my sound like, the feeling that you're going to get when you watch it," she says. "But the most important thing to me: Each episode is written by a different writer. We all come up with the stories together, we pitch on them, we kick the tires of them. But I really want the writers to shine within their own episodes. So when assigning them, it was sort of looking at the skill sets of the writers and saying, 'great, you have a lot of experience writing horror or thrillers or adventures or romance. You really are a character-driven writer.' And then allowing them to shine within that episode. I don't want everything to sound like I wrote it. That is my worst nightmare. No one wants that, especially when you're bingeing episode after episode, which you get to do on Netflix. You want individual episodes to really have a distinct tone and to have a different and exciting story or way of telling a story."
• Hissrich is taking a very different approach with fan interaction compared to Game of Thrones: “I wanted to have a dialogue with the fans,” she says. “I put myself on Twitter very, very early on and announced who I was, what I was doing, and was met with all sorts of reactions, good and bad, but I stuck around. What I want people to know is that I love this franchise. It doesn’t mean I’m going to do everything that fans want me to do, or do it the way they think it should be done, but as long as they know I’m trying to honor the same thing that they love because I love it too, I tell myself we’ll be all good.”
• Hissrich acknowledges The Witcher-Game of Thrones comparisons: “I hope that’s our show,” she says of the HBO drama's critical acclaim and awards. “They brought fantasy to the masses. Two years ago I said, ' I’m not a fantasy writer.’ I’m not sure I’d have said, ‘I’m a fantasy viewer.’ Now I know I am, because I sat and watched Game of Thrones and have never been more invested in a show in my life.”
• Henry Cavill explains Geralt's Rivian accent: "For me it wasn’t necessarily about giving Geralt a specific accent which was different from everyone else, because that would be impossible because there are a lot of English accents and eventually you’re gonna run into someone who has a similar accent because they are trying something different,” he says. “So for me, it was about bringing a voice to Geralt which was expressing the essence of who he is in the books and bringing that to the space in the format that was allowed within the show.”