The witcher

Thursday

James Delingpole

If you watch one thing this Christmas, make it The Witcher

From our UK edition

If you only watch one thing on TV this Christmas, make it The Witcher (Netflix). It’s by turns funny, exciting, scary, moving, dark, exhilarating; the special effects and battle sequences and fantastical walled cities are convincing; the casting and acting are pleasing; the storylines are a perfect balance between the intimate and the epic. I’m completely hooked. But what makes it so vastly superior to, say, the other big sword and sorcery series currently on TV, Amazon’s The Wheel of Time ? What it boils down to, I think, is congruence. The Witcher (being based mainly on a popular video game) knows what its preposterousnesses are and inhabits them like well-fitting armour. It knows its audience and wants to delight them.

Monday

James Delingpole

The Witcher’s hours

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. If you want to get really depressed about the future of television, consider this: over Christmas, The Witcher was Netflix’s highest-rated original series on IMDb, beating everything from Black Mirror to Stranger Things and The Crown. The reason you should be depressed is that The Witcher’s popularity may send a dangerous signal to screen producers: don’t worry about the script or the acting, just chuck in lots of monsters, ultra closeups of swords cleaving heads, arrows going into people’s eyes and girls in body-hugging leather fantasy outfits, like a Dark Ages version of Hooters.

witcher