Reviews

***Contains minor spoilers***

(Season 1 only. For now.)

• Visuals, music, sound and overall theme are really well done. Not much to complain.

• Overall cast is good. Cast for the major roles of Geralt & Ciri are on point. Henry Caville carries the whole show. I also really dig the role of Jaskier. Yennefer and especially Triss are questionable. Cast for certain roles simply do not match the Witcher universe but that doesn't hurt the show unless you are a die-hard book/game fan. (Without getting political here, people who read the books & played the games will understand.)

• The writing can be confusing. It lacks focus and the pacing feels too slow:

You get thrown into separate timelines and places without really knowing for most part of the season - which is even worse if you have no previous experience with The Witcher. I get what they were trying to achieve but it just didn't work very well. A simple "some time ago in..." would have made things much more clear.

The show is too heavy on background story, secondary characters and sideshows when it should be more about Geralt, the Witcher - and Ciri. Especially Yennefer's role is much too prominent and the Mages' background story largely irrelevant for the story to come. It feels as if they wanted to cram in as much character and background story as possible in just eight episodes and it shows. It would have been better to focus more on Geralt (and Ciri) and introduce other characters step by step during later seasons. They should have cut the rather long >60 minute episodes to ~45min and rearranged them into a few more episodes that focus primarily on Geralt/Ciri vs. Yennefer, the Mages and other background story.

There is not enough monster slaying in a show about a guy whose only purpose is slaying monsters. I don't know if this was due to budget reasons or writing but you rarely see Geralt actually fighting monsters. They only hint at what he's capable of or why people specifically hire Witchers to kill monsters. Why is he wearing that wolf medaillon and what makes it so special? What about his two swords? How does he fight specific monsters? Rarely a word about Geralt's superpowers, and heightened senses or his vast knowledge of natural herbs, alchemy and potion making. Much like Batman he is also a deductive genius and detective who can solve mysteries that no normal human could. All of this would have helped to break the rather long and monotonous scenes and dialogues mentioned further above.

TL;DR: A decent introduction to the Witcher universe with much wasted potential and lots of room for improvement. Reviews from both extreme ends of the IMDB scale can't be taken seriously. The show is neither great nor terrible.