‘The Witcher’ EP Blames American Fans For The Show’s Disappointing Third Season : “It’s Painful For Us, And For Me Too” 

After closing out its most recent (and poorly received) season, The Witcher executive producer Tomek Baginski shed some light on the creative decisions they made for the show, seemingly putting some of the blame on American fans.

The widely popular Netflix series has caught some flack for watering down the storyline set in Andrzej Sapkowski’s original stories, which the series is adapted from. But Baginski says these changes were “necessary” to reach a wide audience.

“When a series is made for a huge mass of viewers, with different experiences, from different parts of the world, and a large part of them are Americans, these simplifications not only make sense, they are necessary,” he said to Polish news site Wyborcza in a recent interview. “It’s painful for us, and for me too, but the higher level of nuance and complexity will have a smaller range, it won’t reach people.”

This isn’t the first time Baginski has put some of the onus on the audience’s expectations.

“When it comes to shows, the younger the public is, the logic of the plot is less significant…Those people grew up on TikTok and YouTube, they jump from video to video,” he said in an interview with the Polish YouTube channel Imponderabilia last year. He noted that young fans were more compelled by “emotions” than plot.

The Witcher‘s audience score on Rotten Tomatoes has fallen to 56 percent after both parts of Season 3 aired on Netflix this summer. On top of the criticisms the show had already been facing for deviating from its source material, lead actor Henry Cavill announced last October that he would not be returning to the series, and will instead be replaced by Liam Hemsworth.

Series creator Lauren Schmidt Hissrich said in December 2022 that they planned to give Cavill’s Geralt of Rivia “the most heroic sendoff.” But, the final three episodes of Season 3 proved to be anything but that, according to the episodes’ low IMDb scores.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s James Hibberd connected The Witcher Season 3’s poor reception to that of Secret Invasion, which has seen similarly low reviews from critics and fans alike.

“It’s as if the franchise fatigue that’s been plaguing big-screen superhero films has now extended to TV,” Hibberd writes of the slump big IP franchises like these are seeing. “Except in these cases, it’s not as if viewers didn’t tune in to the shows — The Witcher fans, for instance, were rather eager to see Cavill‘s final episodes — so much that they were disappointed with the result.”

But there’s more in store for Geralt. Hissrich teased, “Geralt has a new mission in mind when we come back to him in season four. He’s a slightly different Geralt than we expected. Now, by the way, that’s an understatement.”

But, considering Cavill’s exit and the show already heading in a direction that fans aren’t enjoying, there’s no telling what the viewership for The Witcher Season 4 will look like.

The Witcher Season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.