1y ago

The Witcher producer blames Americans and social media for Netflix series' simplified plot

www.eurogamer.net The Witcher producer blames Americans and social media for Netflix series' simplified plot

The executive producer on Netflix's The Witcher has blamed American audiences and social media sites such as TikTok for…

108 comments

Look at this clown! First, they came out saying they weren’t even fans of the material. You have Henry Cavil in the lead role who is a super fan of the source materials arguing with you and the writers about the show. And then you finish it off by blaming the audience for your decisions. Mind you, the audience you have ultimately attracted is largely influenced by the decisions you have made throughout the production of YOUR show. The audience didn’t make this show, YOU did
- Is this the same person? This is just an executive producer, not the writer or show runner.
  Pretty funny to call out someone for not reading something while simultaneously not reading the article to know who it is you're even talking about.
  
  If you're the executive producer, it's your fault that your team members fucked it up. If you cannot find a competent writer to properly express nuance on the screen, it's still your fault. You hired the wrong person to adapt the books. You are the boss, the final say, the one-ass-to-kick when things go wrong. The Witcher is not some nuanced story about regional distinctions in low-visibility communities told in short form, which seems to be his only acclaimed experience, followed by several production failures.
  This entire interview comes down to "those lazy zoomers don't know how to appreciate good film." From the description of his past, massive failures it appears to be a problem with his process and ability, not an audience problem.

Yeah, right.
I don't think any American was like "wow I want a shittier version of the Witcher to watch, that'd be sooo great!"
- American test audiences literally said that for I Am Legend which combined with studios unopinionated cowardice caused them to ruin the ending, amongst many, many, many other times that test audiences have given bad artistic feedback.
  His anger should probably be focused at the showrunner / studio, but I'm guessing he's not risking burning those bridges so is instead blaming the only other party in the decision making process, the test audiences.
  
  Judging by your other claim in this thread that Americans have a 20% illiteracy rate, as an American here's a 20% effort response:
  Hurpdurp what's i am legend gotta do with witchermans durrr

The games and books seemed to do just fine in America lol
- The Witcher 3 is one of the best selling games ever, and is considered by critics and fans alike to be one of the best games of its genre ever. This guy is a fucking clown.
  
  Yep lol it's laughable. Love your user icon, I use the N7 icon for a lot of different services.
  
  Yes, came here to say this. Thank you for your services. American executive never own any failures. Claw back their bonuses, fucking brain piece of shits can't even do their jobs anymore.
- Yea but that’s only because the game has lots of pretty, moving pictures. And the books have pretty covers.
  I’m American, so I can’t even read. I noticed some symbols in the show that could be conceived as trying to impart words or ideas, and it just turned me right off.
  You might be asking yourself: “If I can’t read, then how did I understand and respond to this topic?”, and I would then respond: “SHUT UP VOICES IN MY HEAD!”
  
  This reads like a Dave Attell stand-up act lol
  
  Great comment, but could have used a more realistic scenario of using a screen reader/dictation software to comment. It's okay though, I get that you needed to simplify it for the American audiences.

"we want to make more money so we dumbed down the plot to idiot level and blame it on americans being dumb. Also we changed everything to be more emotional because that's what tiktoks kids want, more emotion and less plot or something"
Guy sounds like a twat.
- He's a guy that is hitting excel spreadsheet metrics from past shows, wondering why his metrics aren't appealing to people.

When it flops they'll blame Americans too. Narcissists are incapable of assuming responsibility for their own failures.

This is the kinda guy that would yell at parking sign for smashing into his car.
- It's worse, he's smashing his face with it and yet refuses to acknowledge the parking sign while complaining about some other imaginary obstacle instead.
  If it were true that Americans & social media wanted such simplified plot, it would have been more successful than it was.

We made it this way because you're stupid. Also, if you don't like it, you're stupid.
No wonder it turned out to be a pile of dogshit.

Yeah, blame your customers.
Simplifying is really different from what they did which is completely alter characters, unnecessarily kill off characters, introduce new plots that didn't exist, etc. The Lord of the Rings movies, and the recent Dune movie both did a lot of that but are considered fantastic adaptations. Even Game of Thrones was an excellent adaptation for the first 5 seasons and had huge mass market appeal while still being complex.
This is just shitty writers making excuses.
- man the dune movie was so interesting sounding and watching it was such a ... idk... it was an experience. There was so much stuff that seemed so loosely strung together to the point of feeling almost baffling. I wouldn't think LoTR or early GoT are comparable?
  
  :shrug: I liked it.
  
  You might need to go back and watch it again. I had a completely different experience, and I found the plot rather cohesive. It's one of the best movies I've ever seen in my opinion.

I know everyone thinks I'm a brittle American, but I'm kind of sick of everyone blaming Americans for choices that are made by people who think poorly of Americans.
- As a general rule, the people making decisions to simplify things because they think Americans can't handle a complex source ARE Americans.
  
  @Windex007 Yeah, but they see themselves as smarter than the rest of the Americans when they are in fact, the bottom percentile.
- I'm pretty sick of Americans feeling picked on.
  You have an illiteracy rate of like 20%. Make a real public school system and then we'll talk.
  
  @masterspace All right, so I was interested in the statistic so I looked it up and 20% of Americans are at Level 1 literacy or below according to Wikipedia... which means that actually a lower number than that is functionally illiterate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteracyintheUnitedStates
  And out of curiosity I looked up Canada. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/literacy 22% Level 1 or below.
  Allowing for margin of error, your public school system sucks just as much as ours. So go milk a moose in French.
  
  @masterspace Oh go milk a moose.

You know that meme where the guy riding the bike sticks a crowbar in the tire? Yeah...
- https://imgflip.com/i/7ujdz3
  There you go
  
  https://imgur.com/gallery/reg6pDo

Sounds like sour grapes and rationalization. The producer states that his complicated projects failed. If all of your complicated projects failed, then it may be that you struggle with making complicated projects, not that Americans don't like complicated projects.
Plus, it sounds like he disproves his own point without realizing it. He simplified the Witcher and it still isn't doing well. Isn't that an indicator that maybe plot complexity isn't as strong of a predictor of audience engagement as he thinks?
- And yet Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon are both in the same fantasy genre with complex storylines and they did great in the US.

This is coming from someone who never even read the books and got in fights with HC because of deviating from the world of the books/games?

Yup cause Amaricans wrote the script and decided against the millions of of fans (including the lead actor) who specifically said the new direction sucked directly to the entire production team... yup amaricans.

He's really blaming the execs and showrunner between the lines I think. Saying she had to "make tough decisions" means "she fucked up". It's Netflix and the showrunner who think they need to go to the lowest common denominator with scripts to appeal to Americans, especially hard fantasy/sci-fi. So he's kinda pissed at both groups really not just audiences.
It's a shame because other works like GOT 1-5 show the opposite. Go for complex, go for the source material, and audiences will be patient for it.
- Then blame execs and showrunners, not the audience. American audiences are savvier than he thinks, just because he had one pitch that didn't fare well with American audiences doesn't mean that they won't embrace more complicated elements of The Witcher.
  Plus it just sounds sad; blame audiences for something you, as a producer, can't effectively produce.
  
  He wasn't showrunner, just EP on 16 episodes, and he can't burn the showrunner or Netflix if he wants more work in the industry.

I blame the fact that the producer doesn't give a single fuck about the story.

Game of Thrones was the most popular show in the world not too long ago and is more complicated. House of the Dragon is also complicated and did well just last year. There have been tons of complicated dramas that have been popular. This is just a dumb excuse

The tale of producers dumbing down plot and dialogue for greater main stream appeal is as old as show business. And from my experience said producers are almost always wrong. Sorry pal, but you can't blame social media for something your peers have always been doing.

While I've enjoyed seasons past, including the animated bit they put out that one year, after watching an episode and a half of the first half of this last season 3 a couple things became clear, there are too many subplots/characters to the point that I simply tune out all the names and don't care, focusing instead on the main three, and lastly that I'm bored. It's become something tiresome, and I shut it off after a couple episodes, maybe I'll revisit, probably not.
- It doesn't get better. S3 is so far detached from what season 1 brought to the table as to be mockery. The acting feels so forced in this one.
  
  That's a shame, but this kind of shit is why I cancelled my Netflix and never looked back.

This is just damage control, there doesn't have to be meaning to these words other than a try of appeasing the fans. That said though, it's ironic how the Witcher games at least (haven't read the books yet) have quite mature and well-written content compared to most other games, so they're like the opposite of what he's trying to say here and people LOVE the games for that. So it's literally the opposite that's true. If you put out over-simplified garbage, you will not create anything good with that kind of ingredients.

Have they canceled this dumpster fire yet?

How? Aren't they the ones in charge? American audiences have as much influence on the product they chose to deliver as Americans did for Dark. Great show by the way.
- Dark and 1899 were both great. 1899 got canceled already though, because the Netflix people are stupid.
  
  1899 was garbage and can't even be compared to Dark. Dark was so much better.

Series Produced by
Jason F. Brown ... executive producer (24 episodes, 2019-2023)
Steve Gaub ... executive producer / co-producer (24 episodes, 2019-2023)
Tomasz Baginski ... executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2023)
Sean Daniel ... executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2023)
Lauren Schmidt Hissrich ... executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2023)
Mike Ostrowski ... executive producer / producer / co-executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2023)
Jaroslaw Sawko ... executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2023)
Piotr Sikora ... executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2023)
Simon Emanuel ... consulting producer / executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2021)
Matthew O'Toole ... executive producer (16 episodes, 2021-2023)
Matthew Bouch ... consulting producer (12 episodes, 2021-2023)
Katie Bullock-Webster ... post producer (8 episodes, 2019)
Declan De Barra ... supervising producer (8 episodes, 2019)
Ildiko Kemeny ... co-producer (8 episodes, 2019)
Jenny Klein ... co-executive producer (8 episodes, 2019)
Sneha Koorse ... supervising producer (8 episodes, 2019)
David Minkowski ... co-producer (8 episodes, 2019)
Suzie Shearer ... line producer (8 episodes, 2019)
Mark Birmingham ... co-producer (8 episodes, 2021)
Sean Guest ... associate producer (8 episodes, 2021)
Sam J. Brown ... associate producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Ben Burt ... associate producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Javier Grillo-Marxuach ... executive producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Haily Hall ... co-producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Sasha Harris ... producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Veselin Karadjov ... line producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Tania Lotia ... supervising producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Tera Ragan ... co-producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Alik Sakharov ... executive producer (7 episodes, 2019)
Kathy Lingg ... executive producer (6 episodes, 2019)
Juan Cano Nono ... Líne Producer Canary Islands (4 episodes, 2019)
Beau DeMayo ... co-producer (2 episodes, 2019)
Stephen Surjik ... executive producer (2 episodes, 2023)
Marc Jobst ... consulting producer (1 episode, 2019)
- God... it's like having having an entire 8-level deep organizational structure for a team of 10 people. No wonder it's mismanaged to shit.
  
  Yeah, it looks pretty bad from that list. It may not be quite as bad in practice - some of them may have their name attached because, for instance, they co-own a production company where only person is involved but all three co-owners get their names on the credits. And some of them may be involved on the technical side, some for the story side, some just for financing, etc.
  But even so, that looks like far too many names to have any kind of coherent vision.

Huh, the games did phenomenally well in America. Weird. /s
We're in an age of knee-jerk finger pointing, with the problem getting worse the higher you get in society. It's just one giant game of blame hot-potato.
Here's the thing: The producers don't owe the fans shit. They don't owe the fans an explanation even. They owe the investors an explanation. The fans are just there, that's the reality of being a fan of something. We don't get a say, we just can choose to watch or not, and then decide to trash it or praise it online if we want to.
So while there's a problem going up the ladder of the blame game, there's another one coming back down the ladder, and it's entitlement. For some odd reason there's an air of "we deserve this content, exactly to our specifications" and it permeates games, movies, music, all of the entertainment content we have been inundated with as a society. And I think the culture generally leans towards encouraging it because it keeps the culture thriving. But it also keeps us in the exact status quo we're in as a society, beholden to these billionaire publishers we all rail on daily.
Because let's face it: We as a society spend an enormous amount of energy and as such, destroy a lot of the planet, on all this entertainment. If we can't accept that as a fact then we're fucking doomed.
- So... the supply side matters but the demand side does not? Pfft.
  If you make a thing that has an established fan base, and the fans are not happy, you screwed up. This isn't a problem with fans, it's a you problem. So how do you NOT screw up? You listen to the fans. Ideally, you hire people who are fans themselves.
  Let's analogize: say carrots are in high demand - people can't get enough of them. And you tell everyone you have a big shipment of carrots coming in. And you set up a store called "Jim-Bob's Carrot Emporium", and people are lined up around the block... but it turns out the only thing you sell are potatoes... yeah, people are going to be pissed, and they will be justified, because you sold them a lie.
- Fans are very important. I think you may be on to something that we as a society are starting to feel entitled when it comes to media, but downplaying the importance of the fans and saying they don’t matter is a bit too much.
  In recent memory I can think of a few examples where fans had a major effect on the entertainment content we received.
  The response to the first Sonic trailer was abysmal and much of the internet called them out for Sonic’s design. The studio listened… the artist who designed Sonic’s look even went to Twitter to thank people for all of the feedback. Then they went back, redesigned his look throughout the film and we got a pretty solid film out of that.
  The entirety of #ReleaseTheSnyderCut managed to convince WB to bring Snyder back and let him finish his vision.
  I mean even in comics, the fans mattered. How many times have comics held contests or write-ins to vote on decisions for certain characters or directions to take the story. The big one that comes to mind is the death of Jason Todd. People hated his Robin and voted to kill him off. Eventually he was brought back as Red Hood, but none of this would have occurred without the fans.
  Oh and who could possibly forget Morbius getting rereleased because Sony mistakenly thought people loved it since there was so much online discussion and memes regarding the movie. For better or worse, fans (consumers) did that.
  
  There's a difference between choosing and listening to fans (critics) to improve and being made to feel obligated to do so. This society literally harasses people over being upset at fictional portrayals of cartoons. Sometimes harassed right out of their chosen career. Game devs know this very well.
  Content creators have no obligations to the consumers of the content, period. No more than Picasso had an obligation to paint landscapes. He didn't care to so he didn't.
  Content creators, publishers, etc: they're free to make schlock we don't like, and we're free to express our disdain for it, and I'm free to point out that the folks wasting their energy complaining are indeed, wasting their energy. And cringey to boot. There's a line crossed when you start insisting and making personal commentary at all. A publisher's interests and the fan's interests are not always aligned. That's fine. You can deal with it, I promise. You bring up the snyder cut: Know who probably drove that whole push? The studio. Yeah, every one of those "fans" got played. This kind of shit is unacceptable. Period.
  https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/justice-league-the-snyder-cut-bots-fans-1384231/
  Don't encourage it.

Alternative headline "Person highly involved with making show blames anyone but themselves for failure"

"The algorithm is the algorithm."

Remember, Game of Thrones did well, and that's not a simplified show during its peak.

When asked what he believed to be significant for younger people, Baginski replied: "Just emotions. Just pure emotions. A bare emotional mix. Those people grew up on TikTok and YouTube, they jump from video to video."
So basically It's Gen Z that he couldn't create an interesting plot from the source material

Season 2 ("Book 1" in the US), I agree made some TERRIBLE changes, especially around Yennifer's relationship with Ciri.
Having just finished Season 3, however, I feel like they mostly pulled back into following the book's major plotlines. Sure, a TV show makes some concessions on content, but overall I felt it followed the books "okay". Everything that happened in Thanedd was close, and everything after that too, in the final 3 episodes. Rience was the strangest change to me, since that doesn't happen for several books and it's Ciri's doing.
Does the general public agree? Or are we still so mad about Season 2 that we refuse to see Season 3 positively?
- I'm not watching S3, knowing Cavill won't be back. Not worth investing anymore time. The series is a failure to me.
  
  This. I see no point in investing any more of time in this show. Netflix needs to fire everybody, pull every episode from existence, and just start over with people who actually care about the source material and are willing to invest the time, effort, and respect to do it right.

It's a bold strategy, Cotton!

Right... It's the audience's fault and not the show runners who outright refused to follow the books and games leading to the star of the show leaving. 🙄

What a muppet...

Sooo ... are we getting some blonde royal witch that lost her kingdome to ride a dragon (flying unicorn?) & genocide a bit in the next series?
The previous time around we got some really top level memery out of it ... tho it ~~would be~~ will be a shame with this one :/

108 comments