Despite an often hard-to-follow first season, The Witcher was embraced by fans. While season 2 was a little more conventional, it received positive reviews, and the franchise's future looked bright.
However, the Netflix series also veered greatly from the source material during its second batch of episodes, and things only got worse when allegations followed that those working on the series had been disrespectful towards Andrzej Sapkowski's novels and the hit video games based on them.
Heading into season 3, The Witcher is coming off the back of Blood Origin flopping when it launched last December and the news Henry Cavill will be replaced by Liam Hemsworth in planned fourth and fifth seasons.
Perhaps looking for a measure of damage control, showrunner Lauren Schmidt-Hissrich acknowledged the criticisms and promised to make things right when the show returns later this month.
"The truth is that we always obviously start from the books. But I talk a lot in interviews about the fact that you cannot go straight from a page to a screen," she explains (via SFFGazette.com). "And so what we try to do and what I've always talked to Sapkowski about is keeping the tone of the books the same."
"And I think as long as we do that, as long as we're trying to invest in those stories in the way he wanted to tell them. Which is really about a family coming together, then I feel like we're in safe territory."
"Season two obviously had a lot of...there was a lot of controversy about how much we changed," Schmidt-Hissrich admitted. "I thought that ‘Blood of Elves’ was incredibly difficult to adapt, because there wasn't a lot of big action. And as much as you can talk to book lovers and book purists and say like, ‘But no, this could have been beautiful!’ It could have been. I actually believe over eight episodes, it would've been too slow to keep its momentum."
It's good that the showrunner can see why fans had an issue with The Witcher's second season, and we'd like to think a return to form will ensure this series survives beyond season 5 (it's previously been rumoured that's where it will conclude).
The Witcher season 3 is coming to Netflix in two parts with the first five episodes set to premiere on June 29. The next three will then follow on July 27.