The Witcher losing a lot of its audience base in season 3 is apparently not sitting so well with the powers that be, but instead of finding the faults in their own work, they’re shifting the blame to the viewers, claiming that this simplified, unfaithful take on Andrzej Sapkowski’s work that incorporates none of the nuances of the original material is due to the younger generation’s… well, stupidity.
We’re not even strictly paraphrasing here. During a recent chat with Polish site Wyborcza (transcribed by Redanian Intelligence) executive producer Tomek Baginski had a lot to say about the oversimplification of the plot, which is to say, he took shots at the younger generation and social media users, while somehow managing, in the same sentence, to reinforce stereotypes about the intelligence of Americans. Yikes.
“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. “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.”
Those same people Baginski is indirectly calling dumb or at best, unable to follow the nuances of a complicated narrative, appreciate many works of art that do just that. When will Netflix simply admit that they don’t know how to do The Witcher adaptation justice? I’m sure they at least recognize that people didn’t have the same sort of problems with CD Projekt’s highly acclaimed video game trilogy.
And this might not be the worst of Baginski’s fallacious arguments. In another interview, he apparently claimed that the younger an audience is, “the logic of the plot is less significant” because those people apparently grow up on YouTube and TikTok and wouldn’t mind a story that jumps from one meaningless and emotionally charged scene to the next.
Frankly, I’ve been left a little speechless, so I’ll let you make of these words what you will.