Showrunner Lauren Hissrich said in a Reddit AMA that Season 2 is expected to premiere in 2021. “We don’t yet have a target launch date for S2, past 2021. We don’t want to rush the product. That doesn’t benefit anyone,” she said.
Now Playing: Netflix’s The Witcher Season 1 Spoiler Review
Naturally, people flooded the AMA with questions about what to expect in Season 2. Hissrich didn’t give away any specifics, but she did promise that the story will be “much more linear.”
One of the critiques of Season 1 was that the story’s different timelines could be hard to follow. In Season 2, the three main characters will have their individual stories intersect more, and this should help with the flow, Hissrich said. “The story will be much more linear, now that the three characters’ stories have started to intersect,” she explained.
The Witcher Season 1 included eight episodes, which some remarked was fewer than they expected. Hissrich explained that the number of episodes in a TV show season depends on a number of factors, including the story they want to tell and the budget, as well as an estimation of what the audience might want to see. The Witcher being a new show, Hissrich said more episodes would have led to a smaller budget per episode. “So we knew we didn’t want to do that. Eight felt like the magic number,” she said.
With Season 2, Hissrich and her team are approaching the number of episodes similarly. “What are the stories [author Andrzej Sapkowski] was telling, and why? What building blocks do we need to set up future stories? Is there anything we missed from S1 that we want to include? And what will work on television?”
One thing you won’t see in is Triss having an extended spell of uncontrollable and slimy poop.
“No one wants to see Triss have diarrhea for three episodes,” she said. So what are we trying to glean from that in the books, and how do we present that onscreen?
Also in the AMA, Hissrich responded to a question regarding how The Witcher show handles diversity. She said in the books, it is assumed that everyone in the universe has the same color skin. In the TV show, Hissrich and her team decided to pursue a different way of thinking.
“Because it’s 2020, and because the real world is a very big and diverse place, we made a different assumption on the show: that people don’t pay attention to skin color,” she said. “Not because they’re all the same color, but because the bigger differences are about species, not skin. If you went to your local supermarket and there were people with horns and tails, do you really think you’d be paying attention to how much melanin is in their skin?”
For Season 2, Hissrich said her team will continue to do cast the best actors for any new roles, regardless of their skin color.
“We do color-blind casting, and we work hard to make sure that no one feels like they can’t put themselves up for a role just because they’re not the ‘expected’ look of the character. We will continue to do this in S2, and hope to expand our reach even more,” she said.
The release of The Witcher TV show appears to have helped The Witcher 3, as the CD Projekt Red game recently passed 100,000 concurrent players on Steam which is an all-time high for the 2015 game.
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