"The Witcher," Year One

Minor spoilers ahead.

Well, it's not "Game of Thrones." Trying to find comparable series to "The Witcher" brings me farther back to the low-budget charms of "Xena: Warrior Princess" and various '80s action shows. Despite playing around with some ongoing storylines, at its heart "The Witcher" is an episodic action-adventure series. The hero rolls into a new town every week, fights a new monster or solves a new mystery, and then moves on. Despite its high budget and some great fight choreography, the quality of the show is wildly inconsistent, and I don't think it has a good notion of what it actually wants to be. Grimdark medieval action for edgy gamer guys? Serious high fantasy with pointed criticism of the genre's treatment of women? Campy B-movie style adventure serial?

Let's start from the top. The "Witcher" of the title is Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill), a monster hunting loner who was created with the help of magic, and uses special skills and powers to fight demons and evil spirits and other supernatural beasties. People avoid Witchers, and Geralt is no exception, until a bard named Jaskier (Joey Batey) starts spreading around tales of his might and bravery, helping his reputation. We learn that Geralt's fate is entwined with that of a young princess named Ciri (Freya Allan), who is on the run after the invasion of her kingdom. "The Witcher" also follows the career and fortunes of Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra), a "crooked" hunchback girl who is recruited by a rectoress, Tissaia de Vries (MyAnna Buring), to train to be a mage.

From the beginning, "The Witcher" is trying to do a lot of different things. It's trying to set up a fantasy universe full of showy magic and different groups of imaginary creatures. It has three totally different narratives and main characters to worry about. Yennefer's story is the most successful, a straightforward telling of her ascension from disfigured nobody to powerful mage. She's a strong character, with an interesting history of morally gray choices, and big ambitions. Geralt is a much more stereotypical badass type, essentially a sword-and-sorcery universe Wolverine, but he cuts such a charismatic figure thanks to Henry Cavill's committed performance that it's easier to ignore that the show really doesn't give him much depth or shading. He delivers the big action scenes, says a gruff line or two, and it's enough. Ciri, alas, barely has a personality and even less to do. She spends the whole season stuck in cycles of running away, getting captured, and being reminded of her ominous destiny.

The one big storytelling gimmick that the series has - and warnings for a significant spoiler here - is that it plays around with time. Each character's narrative happens in order, but they're asynchronous with each other and often happening on massively different time scales. It's only when you get to the end of the season that everything matches up. The trouble is that the execution of this relies on a lot of visual cheats, and there are too many instances of unnecessary confusion. For instance, there's the notorious fifth episode, the one that was at the center of the big EW critic controversy. Not only is it tonally completely different from the rest of the series, it presents a version of Yennefer significantly different from the last time we saw her due to a timeskip. It's not that hard to figure out what's going on, but at the same time, it's hard to shake the sense that the show is not playing fair with its audience.

I also wasn't too impressed with the worldbuilding, which is very derivative of other fantasy series. There's no sense of the geography of the different kingdoms, magical concepts are introduced at random without really establishing the rules, and I had a terrible time just telling different locations and groups of characters apart. The abiding approach in design and mythology building seems to be exploring the dark side of common fairy tale tropes. Geralt encounters dragons, werebeasts, dark genies, a displaced population of elves, and there's one episode built around a fairly straight retelling of "Hans My Hedgehog." The series is full of sex and violence, but is never really interested in being all that adult. You can only be so mature when all the female mages sport revealing outfits, and Geralt's fight scenes are designed to be showy and cool above all else.

The campiness isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that it often runs counter to the show's other aims. When it's trying to be "Game of Thrones," it falls flat on its face. When it's going for more small scale adventure stories and character portraits, it's more promising. Ultimately, "The Witcher" feels like it has a far more limited premise and universe, and hasn't done all the legwork yet to really establish its world as somewhere worth exploring. It was fun to visit, but the creators have their work cut out for them if they want me to take their efforts more seriously.

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