It’s been a long time coming, but the TV adaptation of The Witcher is fast approaching, and with Comic-Con on we may even get a release date for the show other than just “later this year“, if that’s even still accurate. Nonetheless, details about The Witcher Netflix series are beginning to trickle out. We’ve recently had the first look at the various cast members in costume as Geralt, Ciri, and Yennefer, and now showrunner Lauren Hissrich has revealed some key details about the mature tone they’re going for.
If there’s one things that fans of the games or books know, it’s that the world of The Witcher can be a very violent, and even very sexy, place. Those same fans may have been worried that the TV series wasn’t going to approach those adult themes, and was instead aiming for a more mass-market PG-13 rating, like basically all live-action video game adaptations. However, in her first interview about The Witcher with Entertainment Weekly, Hissrich confirms that the show isn’t “Game of Thrones for kids,” and that it’s actually “a very adult show.”
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“I’ve been rewatching dailies and my kids aren’t allowed to look at the screen anymore after one of them snuck around and saw something they shouldn’t have seen and it scared him,” she said.
Hissrich, who also worked on the similarly adult Daredevil series for Netflix and Marvel, also made sure people were aware that any adult themes were not gratuitous.
“It was important to me that any violence or sex drives the story and is not there just for shock value,” she continued. “I think audiences are really savvy and know when we’re doing stuff to just shock them versus do stuff that really drives the story.”
She also confirmed, as some Witcher video game fans may not have realized, that the TV series is not a video game adaptation. “We’re not adapting the video games, it’s a straight adaptation of the books. Which is great as the video games are, they’re also an adaptation of the books. They went one direction, we actually get to go another.”
So Roach won’t get stuck on top of houses, bridges, or six-feet in the air in the Netflix series. Shame.
