Netflix’s The Witcher show is no stranger to controversy. Fans criticized the first two seasons for wandering far afield from its source material by Andrzej Sapkowski. Things only got more complicated when it was announced that lead actor Henry Cavill would not be returning as Geralt of Rivia after season 3. Add in the widely panned The Witcher: Blood Origin spinoff, and the series has had plenty of mud slung at it over the years.
That brings us to season 3, which has provoked an interesting response from the fandom. While I largely liked the way The Witcher’s third season adapted The Time of Contempt, an iconic book in the saga, it’s once again drawing criticism. Many take issue with how the show handled the ball and coup on Thanedd Isle. While the novel frames the gathering as a political summit, the TV show changes things so that it’s more of an attempt to unify the mages in order to get them back into the good graces of the Continent’s rulers.
The Witcher’s plot was simplified for western audiences
Now we’re hearing a bit more about why The Witcher changed the nature of the Thanedd set piece. Speaking to Polish outlet Wyborcza, producer Tomek Baginski talks in detail about the decision to simplify the more complex elements of the books for the TV show, saying that these decisions were made in order for it to be more digestible to western audiences, and specifically Americans.
Here’s Baginski’s full response to the question about the show’s decision to change major plot elements, as translated into English by Redanian Intelligence:
"But when you start discussing it, it usually turns out that screenwriters thought this solution out, that it’s not completely crazy. It’s no secret that we often disagree. Things are created in the discussion. Michał Niewiara, who is our tester, does a great job, he checks what fits the world from books. Sometimes we get such a long list of things from him, because in many places we went in a different direction. But there’s a reason for it every time.Sometimes the changes are the result of production chaos, because, for example, an actor fell ill and his plot needs to be edited and rewritten within a few hours so that it can be shot the next day, because this is not a plot for which the whole production machine will stop. There are a lot of understandable reasons why controversial decisions are made, but the viewer does not have this context, so sometimes it hurts because something was better in the book.I had the same perceptual block when I presented Hardkor 44 [a never-made variation on the Warsaw Uprising] abroad years ago and tried to explain: there was an uprising against Germany, but the Russians were across the river, and on the German side there were also soldiers from Hungary or Ukraine. For Americans, it was completely incomprehensible, too complicated, because they grew up in a different historical context, where everything was arranged: America is always good, the rest are the bad guys. And there are no complications.When a series is made for a huge mass of viewers, with different experiences, from different parts of the world, and a large part of them are Americans, these simplifications not only make sense, they are necessary. It’s painful for us, and for me too, but the higher level of nuance and complexity will have a smaller range, it won’t reach people. Sometimes it may go too far, but we have to make these decisions and accept them."
Did The Witcher’s plot really need to be simplified?
Baginski makes some interesting points. It’s true that audiences rarely have the context for why decisions are made on set, which can lead to feelings of disappointment when changes from the source material happen in high-profile adaptations like The Witcher. For season 3 in particular, it’s been fascinating to watch the response to Thanedd. Many fans of The Witcher book series have complained about Thanedd being simplified; meanwhile, some TV show-only fans have griped that Thanedd was too confusing. The split makes it easy to understand Baginski’s argument.
Thanedd isn’t the only way The Witcher show has been simplified from its source material. Baginski also talked about the decision to streamline the books’ narrative structure in Making The Witcher: Season 3.
"So, the structure of the original books is very, very interesting, because we are very often jumping forward and jumping back in the narrative of the book. So to make it more streamlined, we decided to use some of the scenes from the previous book, some of the scenes from the next book, to make it more as one timeline.But we also have a few scenes from the first book, which is Blood of Elves, we wanted to give more space to in season two. And we also thought that some of those scenes, like Battle of Shaerrawedd, would be such a great opening to season 3."
The decision to streamline the books’ timeline has gotten far less push back from fans. In the books, Yennefer trains Ciri in secret throughout the back half of Blood of Elves while Geralt is off trying to lure away his foster daughter’s pursuers, but we don’t find this out until the end of the novel, which jumps back in time to show us events from Ciri and Yennefer’s perspective. The Witcher books are rife with this type of timeline trickery. Season 1 of the Netflix show attempted its own take on this sort of thing and it was pretty poorly received.
There are simplifications, and then there’s tossing The Witcher book out the window
One part of the Redanian Intelligence report about Baginski’s statements which has particularly ruffled feathers is a quote from an interview Baginski gave last year published on the YouTube channel Imponderabilia. Baginski was asked specifically about how social media usage has changed audience attention spans and whether he thought that affected viewership of Season 2.
“The audience changes, it’s not like… It all changes. I see the of the processes Jacek Dukaj wrote about in his book After the Script. We resign from cause-and-effect chains, from linear narration. This book-like narration. When it comes to shows, the younger the public is, the logic of the plot is less significant,” Baginski said.
Instead of plot, Baginski thinks that for younger audiences, it’s, “Just emotions. Just pure emotions. A bare emotional mix. Those people grew up on TikTok and YouTube, they jump from video to video.”
When the interviewer pointed out that they happened to be one of these younger people Baginski was referring to, the producer dropped some gruff wisdom that would have made even Geralt of Rivia crack a smirk. “Okay, so it’s time to be serious. Dear children, what you do to yourself makes you less resilient for longer content, for long and complicated chains of cause and effect.”
The Witcher doesn’t think young people care about plot: “Just emotions. Just pure emotions.”
It’s here that I push back. While the response to Thanedd does support what Baginski says about audiences having a harder time following complex TV plots in the social media age, shows like House of the Dragon and Succession have proven that the answer is often to just…write your complex plots more clearly. I’m firmly of the belief that dumbing things down often yields diminishing returns and lowers the quality of the show. Need I invoke the Dorne subplot from Game of Thrones, which was notoriously gutted from its book counterpart?
Blaming reduced audience attention spans for the poor reception to The Witcher season 2 definitely feels like a cop out. That season pretty much tossed the novel, Blood of Elves, out the window and largely made up its own, much less satisfying story. The issue wasn’t that Blood of Elves would have been too hard to follow, but that what the TV show offered instead simply wasn’t up to the quality of the books or the benchmark the show had set with season 1.
We can also see that the source material wasn’t wholly the problem because The Witcher combined two key moments from Blood of Elves — the plan to draw out Rience and the battle at Shaerrawedd — and put them in season 3 instead.
What do you think about all this? Do you agree with Baginski, or do you wish The Witcher stuck closer to the complicated dynamics of Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels? Let’s discuss in the comments.
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