Well, Season 4 is still happening, for some reason. https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/witcher-season-4-laurence-fishburne-regis-1235870071/
I couldn't even get through the last season. I don't often give up on shows, and even rarely mid 3rd season, but I gave up on it.
Interesting. Sounds like he will be playing Regis. I always pictured him being white, probably because of his depiction in The Witcher 3. But I've read Baptism of Fire and I'm halfway through the next book (Tower of Swallows) and I don't recall him being described as white. Maybe I glossed over that. I wonder how they are going to handle the fact that Yennifer is barely in this book (and she hasn't shown up yet in the next one either).
They aren't really follow the books so they can change anything. At least in the second season, I still have to see the third.
Third season more or less followed the book The Time of Contempt, although they did add and change some stuff. Whether or not they did a good job of it is open to discussion. I have mixed feelings about it as I was just getting up to that book as the third season debuted. Regarding race, I'm just saying I don't recall the books specifically saying much about it. If I envision a character a certain race, it probably comes from how the game portrayed them.
https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/the-witcher-ends-season-5-1235974988/ The show will end With Season 5
Not surprised, it definitely seemed like the show popularity was already dropping, and it's probably going to dive off a cliff without Cavill. I've been enjoying it still, but 5 seasons is a pretty good run, especially for Netflix, which rarely seems to do more than three seasons.
Season three took a lot of time to pick up steam. Maybe the overall arc narrative isn't the show's strong suit, I certainly enjoyed it more back when they did the monster-of-the-episode formula. It might have been a bit campy, but it was more fun.
That would probably depend on if they've run out of short stories to adapt. I think part of the reason they did more one off stories during the first season is that a lot of those episode were based on the early short stories, but as they got into season 2 and later now they're adapting the novels.
For me the show really fell off toward the end of Season 2. Season 3 was a minor improvement as it stuck closer to the narrative of the novels, but the biggest problem is that the show runners seem to be focused on what I assume is a Game of Thrones inspired attempt at court intrigue. Too much focus on detailing the politics of the world and too large of a cast when the novels are about the main players in the story and how their quest is affected by the politics that happen largely behind the scenes. The series also suffers from a lack of budget--this should be a sweeping adventure when too much of it takes place inside in fairly generic sets.
I'm going through the novels myself at the moment, and yes, the short stories made for better television than the ongoing plot, which is really a fault of the writers on the show. Netflix wanted SO BADLY for Witcher to be their version of GoT, but the two are like night and day.
One of the biggest flaws across many modern adaptations is thinking you can just mine the story/IP of one setting with the narrative structure of another and make it work. The Witcher is fundamentally a story about a guy who goes around killing monsters, develops a found family, and gets mixed up in shit he'd rather not be, growing in the process. It's not anything like ASOAIF. Applying the format of that series to it does both a disfavor.
I'm over half way through the last book in the saga, Lady of the Lake, and it's really a slog at times to get through. Same with the previous book. It's hard to follow at times when it brings in more and more minor characters and little stories that have nothing to do with the main characters. I don't even recall the last time I read anything about Gerald or Ciri in this book. And forget about Yennifer - she's barely in the last couple of books. I can see them cutting out tons of that extra stuff to make it fit into 2 more seasons. The books were a lot more interesting at the beginning of the saga and in the short stories.
It's as if the producers saw how popular The Witcher was getting, both books and games, that they wanted to take it on, yet not actually care about adapting the works. They just wanted a popular fantasy franchise they could mould and use a popular name. From what I understand, The Witcher as an IP draws heavily from eastern-European folklore, Sapowski being Polish, while GoT is more of a standardized high-fantasy setting.