In less than a fortnight, Netflix will debut the spinoff of its monster-hunting fantasy series The Witcher. The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep takes place during the early days of Geralt of Rivia's monster-slaying career, when he's traveling the Continent with the bard Jaskier and going from one adventure to another.
Sirens of the Deep is the third spinoff so far from The Witcher, after the 2021 animated film Nightmare of the Wolf and the 2022 live-action miniseries Blood Origin. Netflix has gotten into a regular cadence of releasing spinoffs between each season of the mothership show, and shows no signs of slowing down. But what happens when The Witcher ends after season 5? Will we get more spinoffs or stories in this television universe?
The Witcher showrunner Lauren S. Hissrich addressed this question in a recent issue of SFX Magazine (via Redanian Intelligence). “We made a conscious decision to end the live-action show after season five, where the books ended. We felt very strongly about that, but it doesn’t mean that all Witcher storytelling has to be done,“ she said.
Hissrich also discussed how The Witcher came to have so many spinoffs in the first place. “I love this world. I’m constantly looking for other opportunities to expand it outside of the main mothership show," she explained. "I will never forget Kelly Luegenbiehl, who was the Netflix executive at the time, who sold the show with me. It was maybe about a month before the show launched on Netflix, and I came to her and I said, ‘I’m having all of these ideas about spin-offs.’ She was like, ‘Cool. Let’s see if anyone watches the show.’ Because, of course, you never know.”
"As soon as it did, as soon as we were able to start looking at who was watching it, who cared about it, who wanted more – one of the things I felt most strongly about, and it’s not a surprise to anyone, is that the female characters really found an audience. I think it found a lot of people who felt marginalized from fantasy shows in the past."
Should The Witcher continue with more spinoffs after season 5?
On the one hand, the idea of The Witcher being milked for more spinoffs makes me very nervous. Netflix's track record on them hasn't been great so far, with Blood Origin in particular being a rather large dud. Meanwhile, the franchise also tried to get a spinoff about the teenage thieves called The Rats off the ground; that one seems to have fallen through despite going into production, with filming cut ominously short as Netflix backpedaled for some as-yet unknown reason. It was to the production's credit that they decided to wrap up the mothership show with season 5 rather than stretch things out. When it's over, the show will likely align pretty neatly with the end of Andrzej Sapkowski's book series.
On the other hand, The Witcher is often at its best as a property when it gets into the weeds, telling smaller stories about Geralt or other characters going on discreet adventures with sharply drawn themes. This is true for Sapkowski's shorter works, many of which are extremely memorable; it's true for the early seasons of The Witcher TV show, which had its strongest episodes when it homed in on stories like the massacre in Blaviken; and it's true for The Witcher video games by CD Projekt Red, where many of the side quests Geralt is contracted for contain moving stories that cut right to the heart of the saga's tone and style.
This isn't a situation like Game of Thrones, where continuing past the end of the series would innately feel like folly. Both the video games and books have lived on after the end of The Witcher Saga proper, with new entries exploring different periods of Geralt's life. I wouldn't mind Netflix doing something similar, so long as the quality was high.
But let's not put the cart before the horse; first we have to see how the next spinoff out of the stables fares. The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep premieres on Netflix on February 11. And the fourth season of the live-action show will air sometime this year.
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