The first season of The Witcher is set to be released on December 20 of 2019. For those who are unfamiliar, said show seems to be Netflix’s way of securing the fantasy market, so it should come as no surprise to learn that it is based on a very well-known fantasy book series in Eastern Europe. Setting-wise, the series happened on a continent that was never happened. Said continent is inhabited by a number of sapient species. However, humans are the most powerful whereas non-human species have been forced into either the unclaimed wilderness or the ghettos of human cities, thus resulting in much tension. Besides them, there are a wide range of monsters, which is why mutated humans called witchers were created to combat them. For the most part, the witchers’ mutations make them useful, but those same mutations cause them to stand out, thus making them perpetual outsiders.
Story-wise, The Witcher is centered on a particular witcher named Geralt of Rivia. He is more capable than most of his counterparts, both because he responded better to the mutations and because his long career means that he can claim a lot of experience. Personality-wise, Geralt is a consummate professional with little interest in getting caught up in the messy politics of the continent. However, he is doomed to get sucked in, not least because he and his love interest Yennefer are the parental figures for a girl named Ciri, whose heritage has provided her with exceptional powers.
How Long Does the Showrunner Lauren Hissrich Expect the Show to Be?
Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of interest in The Witcher at the moment, which in turn, means that the people behind the show are more than happy to fan that interest by feeding bits and pieces of information to the fans. For instance, the showrunner Lauren Hissrich has stated that she has plans for seven seasons of the show, which is rather ambitious to say the least. This is particularly true because Netflix’s longest-running shows have received seven seasons and no more than seven seasons.
Does This Make Sense?
Some people might wonder whether this much planning makes sense. There is a lot of hype for The Witcher. However, hype on its own is no guarantee that a show can bring in the numbers, which in turn, will determine whether it can survive for such a long period of time. However, there are a couple of good reasons why this kind of planning is a good idea.
First, The Witcher isn’t an original show. There is no way that it will be a perfect, one-for-one copy of its source material, not least because the differences between mediums would make for a very poor show. However, there are a lot of people with some kind of emotional investment in said source material, which is important when they are likely to make up a considerable portion of the potential viewer base. As such, while the people behind The Witcher don’t need to adhere to it in an absolute manner, they do need to keep it in mind while they are working on the show unless they want to ensure a major uproar among the potential viewer base. The issue is that there are eight Witcher books, which isn’t even considering the short stories as well as other side material. Thanks to this, planning ahead is just common sense even if those plans become unrecognizable over the run of the show.
Second, while The Witcher has some stories that can be wrapped up within a shorter period of time, there are other stories that can be expected to run for multiple seasons. Due to this, planning ahead provides the overall narrative with structure, thus making it more coherent and thus more watchable for interested individuals. Of course, no plan can survive contact with implementation, meaning that what is actually made won’t be 100 percent the same as what was planned. However, that makes planning even more important because a well-prepared plan is what enables people to make necessary adjustments without disrupting everything around that changed detail. For proof of how a lack of planning can hamper the making of shows, compare the earlier seasons of Game of Thrones, which had the books to work with, and the later seasons of Game of Thrones, which were based on much vaguer ideas mixed in with the showrunners’ own haphazard inventions and interpretations. In this as in other things, planning out things is critical for making them manageable, with storytelling being no exception to this rule.
Can The Witcher Go the Distance?
With that said, there is no final issue, which is whether The Witcher can last long enough to make this planning meaningful. Unfortunately, no one can predict the future with certainty, but there are reasons to think that it has a fighting chance. For starters, The Witcher does actually have a fair amount of name recognition. As stated earlier, it is a huge series in Eastern Europe. Moreover, it has a fair amount of recognition in the English-speaking world as well thanks to The Witcher video games. Granted, The Witcher video games are actually set after the story of the source material that the show is working with, but that is nonetheless a boost from people who have heard of the franchise and have an interest in it. It won’t be enough to carry the show on its own, but it seems safe to say that it will nonetheless be a major help.
Moving on, it will be interesting to see whether The Witcher can win over interested individuals. Some of its major cast members are relatively new, so much will be reliant on whether they can live up to the potential that the showmakers saw in them. Other major cast members are veterans, with a particularly notable example being Henry Cavill in the lead role, who manages to bring a lot of enthusiasm with him on top of his expertise and experience. Besides this, The Witcher franchise has the action as well as a surprising amount of relevance to modern social issues in the English-speaking world for something that was written in the Poland of the 1990s, both of which are further points in its favor.
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