That season was a fairly close adaptation of The Last Wish, which is a collection of short stories in the Witcher universe and explains why the first season was more fragmented and episodic.

It is the first book in the Witcher series and sets a lot of the very formative worldbuilding details that resurface later on, and so it makes sense for it to be the first season, but subsequent seasons would have to be different.

From my anecdotal experience, I think more people liked the first season than the ones that followed. But I don't think it was necessarily because of the shift from episodic plots to the serialized season-long plots that followed. I blame the fact that the writers for the series felt they could write better than the original author and started doing their own thing with it.

Original writing can be good, and there are definitely some parts of the Witcher books that haven't aged well (or simply wouldn't be good fits for TV), but the TV writers took a chainsaw to the plot when they probably should have taken a scalpel, and if that happens too early and too severely in a story, it just snowballs and gets worse from there.

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 1 points 22 hours ago

I appreciate the insight there! That would explain it.

I also agree it’s not purely because of the episodic shift. I just called it out because that’s something I appreciated. I would agree that people like me could tell that something was off with later seasons even though I don’t know the source material.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 2 points 2 days ago

Yeah I highly doubt Cavill walked away because they knew a few things wouldn't work in modern day. If he walked. I don't think any Witcher fan would be upset about it either, or at least most. We all know the author was a bit of a neck beard.

However, Cavill would leave if they took a hatchet to the original material and disrespected the characters, which knowing Netflix they absolutely would.

Netflix wanted a gritty show like game of thrones but also wanted everything to be a feel good warm and cuddly inclusive welcoming show. They wanted their cake and to eat it too. It's like people forget that when GoT was at it's best it was horrifying. Your favorite characters could die randomly, there was mass death, dismemberment, rape, the very worst of humanity. The Witcher also has the absolute worst of humanity. That's the point. My best guess is they wanted to tone it down, which was not the point of the Witcher series.

The actual point of the series of anyone hasn't gotten it.

The entire time we're following a supposed emotionalless monster hunter around who everyone despises for being weird, while all the whole humanity are the real monstrous ones. That's the point, and they seem to be afraid of making that point.