This is the most series series anyone has ever series-ed. There are actors and backgrounds, occassionally music and action. It checks every mark a current series has to check so I guess it's fantastic.

Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit. Henry Cavill does a good Geralt, the swordplay is done well and the visuals of the games are reproduced nicely, but that's pretty much it. I feel like I'm in the minority here but watchability alone does not mean a show is any good. Recognizable visual elements alone don't make for compelling entertainment either. I'm not a huge fan of the Witcher games but I enjoy them enough and understand why they are so popular. They feel really alive and you have a wealth of choices to interact with their world. If you're watching a series about them most of what makes them so fascinating and fun is stripped away. I understand the business decision of Netflix to make this show, it's a recognizable franchise and someone has to keep the buffet filled with dark gritty sometimes fantasy, sometimes historical fiction shows. On a creative level I don't get this adaption at all though. It adds nothing to the mythos of the games or the books, whereas the games really expanded and improved on the witcher cosmos. In general I don't get these game adaptions at all. Games are their own established art form and have been for several decades, they don't need validation from the movie and tv world now or back in the 90s where you got the prime turkeys of the super mario brothers movie, street fighter or double dragon that at least have some entertainment value because of their complex borderline surreal awfulness. I'm always up for some 90s nostalgia but not like this.

Admittedly I'm not ruling out that I'll watch more episodes but it's always a bad sign when you took a brief nap during an episode and didn't feel like rewinding to see what you've missed.