Henry Cavill’s exit from The Witcher after season 3 gives the show an opportunity: to return to the monster-of-the-week format that gave Netflix a big hit in 2019.
Netflix’s The Witcher is approaching yet another inflection point. The show has gone through many changes over the years, but it’s coming up against its biggest one yet: life after Henry Cavill, with Liam Hemsworth coming in to play Geralt for the fourth season. And it’s an opportunity to return to what brought the show success in the first place.
The Witcher got off to a running start as a series that used monster encounters and fantasy devices to create compelling episodic television that supported the larger world it was building. Sure, there was a larger story, but Geralt’s early stories (and Yen’s, and Ciri’s) were defined by the dangerous encounters and gnarly creatures they had to overcome in each episode.
Then, the show’s second season moved closer to Game of Thrones imitation, sacrificing some of the episodic monster hijinx in favor of the broader story it was trying to tell. And the third season, unfortunately, fully embraced that direction, going heavy on Witcher lore and opaque political plots instead of the simple pleasures of Geralt grunting at and then slaughtering some ghoulish foes.
