The second season of “The Witcher” arrived on Netflix this past Friday with a third season already on the way.
A while back showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich says she was prepared to go the distance and had mapped out seven seasons. Talking with Collider this week, she explained how she came up with that number:
“I do think that my utmost goal and the reason I started with seven years is because I wanted to stay true to the books. I don’t feel the need for our story to go beyond where the books go. I think Andrzej Sapkowski, the writer, he had a natural end in mind. Now actually, since we started the show, he has released more books, so we’ll have to see how that fits into it.”
Hissrich also says it’s important not to lock herself into the ‘one book per season’ approach. We see that in the second season which adapts the second book but leaves one big story element to be incorporated into the show’s third:
“I also think I’m not in a rush to get through these stories, you know? We approximately do a book a season, but we also make sure that the stories from that book are best in that season of our television show. So sometimes we move those chess pieces around a little bit.
There’s a big story from Blood of Elves that we’re gonna do in Season 3 for instance. Or there was a short story that we couldn’t fit in Season 1, so we put it in Season 2. We try to be pretty flexible with that.”
Critics reviews for the second season were markedly improved on the first. Viewership wise it’s presently not clear how well the new run has done with Netflix not likely to report those numbers until sometime in the New Year.
Both seasons of “The Witcher” are currently available on Netflix.
