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NETFLIX GUY blames “Americans and young people” for dumbing down
Former Gerlat Henry Cavill has made a point of saying he “pushed really, really hard” to stay true to the Witcher books, while also claiming that some of the writers on the show “actively disliked” them.
Some aspects of Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels have been simplified for the TV show, and in an interview with Polish site Wyborcza, executive producer Tomek Baginski said: “[A] higher level of nuance and complexity will have a smaller range.” Baginski said he encountered a “perceptual block” with American audiences some years ago, when he was promoting an unfinished film project called Hardkor 44, a sci-fi retelling of the Warsaw Uprising.
“For Americans, it was completely incomprehensible, too complicated, because they grew up in a different historical context, where everything was arranged: America is always good, the rest are the bad guys. And there are no complications.”
That lesson, whether you agree with it or not, apparently stuck. “When a series is made for a huge mass of viewers [and] a large part of them are Americans, these simplifications not only make sense, they are necessary,” Baginski said. “It’s painful for us, and for me too, but the higher level of nuance and complexity will have a smaller range.”
Zinging the US has been a pan-European pastime of highfalutin creatives for decades, sure, but even so the specificity of Baginski’s criticism comes off as kind of weird and unnecessarily insulting.
He’s not done, either. In addition to laying the blame at the door of all Americans, Baginski had more shots to fire: in an interview with YouTube channel Imponderabilia, he pointed the finger at the kids, saying that growing up with YouTube and TikTok has left them without the patience for “longer content [and] long and complicated chains of cause and effect”. The interviewer in this case said, “What you mean is that you don’t know how to make a show that kids would like to watch.” Ouch.
Baginski’s comments have attracted scorn, coming as they do amidst a lukewarm reception to The Witcher’s last season with Cavill. The show has changed many of the books’ major plot points, but at a time when media is either an immediate hit or a complete failure, that’s a problem. A YouTube adaptation, Alzur’s Legacy, doesn’t follow the exploits of Geralt but captures the flavour perfectly – and maybe simplifying the source material is what Netflix is really running up against.
The third season of The Witc
