Updated 4.19.24. See updates below.
Netflix’s The Witcher is coming to an end the streaming giant announced. Netflix announced the renewal of the show’s fifth season, noting that it will also be the last.
Fans of the show have been waiting to learn more about the upcoming fourth season which has just begun production in the United Kingdom. The big change between Season 3 and Season 4 is the lead: Henry Cavill has bowed out as the titular Witcher, Geralt of Rivia, with Liam Hemsworth taking on what must be one of the most challenging recastings in modern television. You can see Hemsworth in the image above, which includes costars Anya Chalotra as Yennefer, Freya Allan as Ciri, and Joey Batey as Jaskier.
“It is with huge pride that we begin shooting our penultimate season of The Witcher with a stellar cast, including some exciting new additions, led by Liam Hemsworth as Geralt of Rivia,” creator and showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich told Netflix. “We’re thrilled to be able to bring Andrzej Sapkowski’s books to an epic and satisfying conclusion. It wouldn’t be our show if we didn’t push our family of characters to their absolute limit — stay tuned to see how the story ends.”
(I will say, it looks like everyone is having a lovely time during the table read. I hope the series itself will be as entertaining for those of us in the audience).
Seasons 4 and 5 will wrap up author Andrzej Sapkowski’s three remaining books: Baptism of Fire, The Tower of the Swallow, and Lady of the Lake. While I’ve largely lost faith in this production—mainly due to its shoddy writing and production values, something even its strong cast cannot save—I am curious to see how they transition from Cavill to Hemsworth and the show’s creators will take any of the past seasons’ criticism to heart.
In my review of Season 3, Part 2 of The Witcher I wrote, rather scathingly:
We all deserved better. Henry Cavill deserved a better series to lead than The Witcher. Fans of the games and books deserved a show that tried harder to succeed as an adaptation, rather than push the political agendas of its creators.
Cavill’s co-stars deserved another season with Cavill as the star, given how glowing they’ve all been about his dedication to the role and the story.
And Netflix (and its shareholders) deserved a show that could actually rival Game Of Thrones, rather than a mediocre, generic fantasy that is—alas—utterly forgettable by the end of its wildly disappointing third season. It didn’t have to be this way.
That was the opening. At the end of the review I write: “I’ll tune in for Season 4, just to see how much worse things can get, but The Witcher is over. It’s dead. Frankly, it died at the end of Season 1. What we’ve been watching since is merely the reanimated corpse of a show that once had so much potential, and is now just a withered husk; some fell beast Geralt will slaughter once and for all, not by fighting it, but by walking away.”
I had such high hopes for The Witcher and while Season 1 wasn’t perfect, it felt like the start of something with a great deal of potential. If only the show had been developed by people who cared more about fidelity to the source material. Even if it hadn’t been an adaptation of the books—similar to how the video games tell new stories rather than adapt the novels—a better understanding of what makes the universe of The Witcher special would have gone a long ways. Hopes dashed, once again. But I’ll try to keep an open mind for Season 4.
Here are more images of the Season 4 table read. You’ll notice another big name cast for Season 4: Laurence Fishburne who will play Regis—Emiel Regis Rohellec Terzieff-Godefroy to be precise—a well-educated friend of Geralt’s with some skeletons in his closet.
Update
I’ve been pondering whether or not this show can be saved—not prolonged—but transformed into an actually decent series for its fourth and fifth season. There are some stumbling blocks along the way. For one, with no disrespect intended for Luke Hemsworth, he has enormous shoes to fill. Henry Cavill was perfect as Geralt of Rivia. Not only did he perfectly capture the character, he was deeply invested in the stories themselves.
Cavill was a fan of both the books and the games and he brought his passion for the stories of the Witcher to the Netflix series. Though we don’t know for sure, it seems likely that his passion for the character and stories butted up against the writers and producers, who were all too willing to change those stories for reasons that remain unclear.
Anya Chalotra, who plays Yennefer in the show, said of her co-star that “it’s a breath of fresh air to have someone to work with that loves the material. It really is. Because he knows more than anyone about the world of “The Witcher,” and all the rules and regulations and the terms and “Witcher” knowledge — he’s up there. So to work with that, it’s a blessing because there are days when you might disbelieve the world a little bit more than the next. And he’s there to go, “Hang on, we’ve got this.”
I think a much bigger stumbling block to the success of Seasons 4 and 5 isn’t Geralt’s recasting, unfortunate though it may be, but what it represents. The loss of his passion.
When we learned that Cavill was leaving the series, writer Beau DeMayo—who has earned acclaim recently for his work on X-Men 97—said that writers on Netflix’s production actively disliked the source material.
“I’ve been on shows – namely Witcher – where some of the writers were not [fans] or actively disliked the books and games (even actively mocking the source material),” DeMayo explained. “It’s a recipe for disaster and bad morale. Fandom as a litmus test checks egos, and makes all the long nights worth it. You have to respect the work before you’re allowed to add to its legacy.”
With DeMayo gone and Cavill gone, what sort of shape will Season 4 and 5 be in? Because the only way this show is saved with a new star at the helm is if the writers and producers take their task of adapting the original works seriously and following the original source material at least as much as they managed in Season 1. If they do that and do it well I could look past a new face as Geralt.
Will you be tuning into Seasons 4 and 5? Let me know on Twitter and Facebook.
