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The Witcher producer blames Americans and impatient young people for the Netflix show's simplified plot
02.08.2023 - 20:07 / pcgamer.com / Henry Cavill
One of the most common criticisms of The Witcher on Netflix is that it strays too far from Andrzej Sapkowski's novels. It may have been a source of some tension behind the scenes, too: Former series star Henry Cavill made a point of saying he «pushed really, really hard» to stay true to the books, while also claiming that some of the writers on the show «actively disliked» them. There's no question that some aspects of the novel have been simplified for the TV show, and in an interview with Polish site Wyborcza (translated by Witcher fan site Redanian Intelligence), executive producer Tomek Baginski explained why some of those changes were made: "[A] higher level of nuance and complexity will have a smaller range."
Sometimes changes are made out of economic necessity: Production can't stop because an actor gets sick, for instance. But the needs of an international audience, particularly a Western audience—and even more specifically the lucrative US market—also have to be kept in mind, according to Baginski. He 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.
"[I tried to explain: There was an uprising against Germany, but the Russians were across the river, and on the German side there were also soldiers from Hungary or Ukraine," he said. «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, with different experiences, from different parts of the world, 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, it won’t reach people. Sometimes it may go too far, but we have to make these decisions and accept them.»
Zinging the US has been a pan-European pastime of high falutin creatives for decades, yes, but even so the specificity of Baginski's criticism—Americans!—comes off as kind of weird and unnecessarily insulting. History is complicated, yes, and it's natural to contextualize it within the boundaries of our own experiences, but citing an inability to grasp complexity and nuance as a specific national trait is a hell of a generalization.
He's not done, either. In addition to laying the blame at the door of all Americans, Baginski had more shots to fire in defence of Netflix's less-literate
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