Like many out there, I have a very insular view of the Witcher as a franchise. I know the thing from it's games and only that. Just as book fans typically stick only to the games, and show fans are ostracized by all the other sectors of the franchise. It's a particularly strange and somewhat ineffective way to run a multimedia franchise, but when literally no facet of the franchise is willing to shake hands with the other what are you going to do? The Witcher games at least try to take the books that had released at the time into account to as full of a degree as they feasibly can, being an RPG video game. The show... wasn't so much interested in even doing that and really... well, the Netflix series kind of looked at the profitable franchise and figured they could puppeteer that corpse into their own thing with a bit of work. Several years later, some odd casting choices and one horrendous PR disaster later- and the series is being cut short.
It is very necessary to remind everyone that no matter how they like to frame it, The Witcher is absolutely not living up to the vision that the showrunners had for it. They like to pretend that they are ending the show and it isn't being cancelled, despite the drop-off of ratings and reviews they got throughout their previous season, alongside the nightmare storm PR they have drummed up consistently. And they also want everyone to forget the 7 season plan the team initially had in place. And those seven seasons were the actual working plan- it's not like the Resident Evil series where the showrunner casually threw up the idea of 20 seasons before farting out a disaster piece of the ages- The Witcher had ambition. For all that ambition ended up amount to...
It seems almost callous to chalk all this fallen potential up to the casting, and subsequent firing, of one man- but if the shoe fits- then it must be said that axing Henry Cavill was probably the death knell for this already struggling brand. After seasons of muddled themes, distorted plot points and straight butchered character arcs- through it all people who actually liked the series could enjoy a solid performance from the one man who perfectly encapsulated his character and seemed more invested in getting the story right than anyone in the writers room. As one of the only Witcher fans in the world who both liked the games and read the books: (Shock of shocks!) the man should have probably been brought on as an executive producer. Instead he was driven from the show and with him went any hope the show would eventually become something worthy of the source material.
Source Material is such a strangely feared concept in the modern scene of adaptations whereupon every adaptor seems so eager to veer off and do their own thing atop the bare bones of the original plan that often times I'm left wondering why it is these creators were 'drawn' to the property to being with! Surely a 'fan' would respect and want to preserve what was so special about the thing they are adapting, rather than just roll over it with their own twisted facsimile of the original. Oftentimes it feels as though perhaps what had drawn them was the 'fandom' rather than the product itself. That 'love', so to speak, which could be opportunistically siphoned off their direction with enough surreptitious reconstructions. That is the only explanation I can fathom for some of the disasters that paint the modern world of TV and film.
So The Witcher is burning down at Netflix, and through the flames we are going to be fed two more series as the franchise chokes on itself and goes out with a whimper. In that time I'll be honest- the idea of recasting your core lead character does intrigue me for how seamlessly they will attempt to pull it off. I mean sure, thanks to the rank incompetence of the writing staff, Geralt's key position as an moral observer judging the worst of the world with an objective eye is practically eliminated in favour of him being dumb strong man with sword- but the white haired badass was still the most recognisable character on the show. Straight up sticking a new handsome actor in his britches is sure to cause some undeniable friction I can't help but be curious at.
Compare this to the world of Fallout for a second. There is an adaptation that didn't just get the look and feel of the original property nearly down pat- (I think there are some tonal issues personally, but if Josh Sawyer himself doesn't see them I'll confess to perhaps being my own kind of misguided in that regard.) but built upon the foundations of the games in order to tell it's own story. It's own, largely derivative, story. Fans love it, critics seem enamoured, and now everyone is scrambling to claim credit for making the show what it is and the franchise too. Witcher, on the otherhand, feels like it's been discarded by the video game community, despite the fact that the brand's international success can be placed pretty much solely on the shoulders of that game series, whether the creator wants to admit it or not!
I do feel bad for the Witcher, because it was actually on of the better properties to suffer this disgrace. Resident Evil was never going to be a strand-out TV show even if it were placed in the hands of competent creatives, but The Witcher actually had that potential. I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to give it the cliche title of 'The next Game of Thrones', given that the scale of The Witcher is inherently personal whereas GOT was telling the story of an era; but it could have been it's own special little gift to fantasy TV storytelling instead of what it ended up being- an increasingly low-effort exercise in pointless excess living up to neither the games nor the books.
No comments:
Post a Comment