The Witcher novels are not high-brow literature. The books are straight forward, tropey, but still fun with good pacing and an engaging story. We follow funny, lively characters through different threads and timelines. But the stories are not The Lord of the Rings in terms of detail. They are books that anyone can pickup and run through in a few evenings. The characters are rememberable, the stories are fun, and you want to know what happens next. But complicated, reflective, esoteric fiction, it is not.

All in all, this makes The Witcher an excellent candidate for television. Comparing it to A Song of Ice and Fire, the stories are much more palatable and digestible for a general audience. Yet for some reason, the folks over at Netflix decided to take this already watered down, simple series of Fantasy novels and short stories to the metaphorical industrial-grade sander that is poor, oversimplified, uninspired writing by a team of writers who seem to believe they are writing for an audience with grade school story comprehension levels.

Instead of expanding on areas that the books lacked the scope to delve into, the show decides to essentially wipe away the nuanced story and give us charactatures of the unique characters we meet in the books. We get characters who make decisions inconsistent with their core respective characterizations. We get rough exposition through dialogue. Speaking of dialogue, the tone of the show feels very cold and imprecise compared to the books. Characters are not believable, they overdramatize, they over-act, they are given dialogue that is inconsistent with real human speech. Nothing is believable.

Considering how much of a layup the source material is, I should really be shocked by how they mucked this up. But when are adaptations actually done well? Especially by Netflix, or other streamers for that matter. Slowly we are learning that these services just simply either don't know how to handle nuanced dramas, or they don't think their viewers are smart enough to digest it. On both ends, those of us fans looking for interesting, well-written stories are left out in the dry.

But hey, there are books and video games to fall back to. And they're pretty darn good.