This series is not really made for those without prior knowledge of the short stories or novels. Thankfully, however, it is better than the 2001 Polish movie and the 2002 TV series.

The good: Henry Cavill was an excellent choice to play Geralt of Rivia. He embodies the titular Witcher not only in his physical appearance but also his demeanor - professional and uninterested in the political turmoil going on around him. The costume design is generally good and the overall production value is high, though of course not on par with Game of Thrones.

The bad: The series starts out slow and does not really get going until about episode 4, which is midway through the first season. As mentioned above, unless you have some prior familiarity with the story either through the novels or video games, things can be really confusing at first. Moreover, the supporting cast is uneven - some are good, others are quite bad. Same for the dialogues.

It remains to be seen if the showrunners can pull off a good TV series. Season one was short and a bit meandering. It is as if the writers didn't know where to begin the story and ended up trying to fit the events in the short stories and novels into just a few episodes, finally setting down on basing the series loosely on the first novel but then running out of time to really do justice to that story arc during the first season.

My hope - and it seems this is the direction of the series, once the writers made up their minds - is that this version of The Witcher will focus on the story of Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri as told in the main novels. In my opinion, this would make for most engrossing story of The Witcher, but it would require better development of some characters and even some changes from what we got in the first few episodes.