It got better a couple episodes in. A lot felt forced, stiff, and didn't have enough suspension of disbelief (that magic touch). But it was good enough to keep me watching and liking it more as it went on. I didn't like the puzzle of events though. Can't wait for a fan edit putting events in sequential order. Just that thing that is hard to put into words. You feel it is all fake whether it is acting, timing, camera work, wire work, choreography or what not. Closer to Shannara chronicles than Game of Thrones in suspension of disbelief. Or World of Warcraft (the movie) rather than Lord of the Rings.

I finished watching The Wicher at one go straight, so it is evident that it kept me hooked until the very end. Let me be clear about something: I am not much of a fan of these medieval sagas. But something about The Witcher struck me as different. Yes, there are many flaws. The acting of the supporting cast is not very strong, the storyline is a bit obvious, and sometimes things happen too conveniently for the story to progress. But the good things certainly dominate the bad things. The "Dunkirk approach" to the editing mostly worked well, even though ambiguity remained at certain places. I guess those will be cleared in the second season. Henry Cavill was magnificent as the titular character. The dialogues were very strong too, thanks to its source material. The pace of the series was strong, and it picked up interest as the episodes rolled by. I, personally, preferred this over the Game of Thrones (I know I am going to get a lot of flak for this), but hey, choices, right?

I originally watched this in 2019 when it released and was a big fan, the world was captivating and interesting yet bleak and grounded. Such was my interest, I shortly after played all the games and began reading the books, now two years later and with season 2 about to come out I decided it was worth a rewatch. On my second watch I wasn't quite as impressed, now able to judge the show both as an adaptation of material, characters and stories I was familiar with from other works and also able to better analyse the show as a piece of television in its own right now that I could better understand the quite convoluted plot and timeline. The Show is an attempt to adapt two collections of short stories that serve as precursors to the main witcher series, these stories are often only loosely connected although are often thematically related and take place over a huge span of time and place. This could lend itself nicely to an anthology style monster of the week collection with common themes, characters and world building however the The show ambitiously tries to construct a cohesive narrative out of this in 8 episodes and it doesn't really quite work, limited to only 8 episodes so much subtlety and intricacy is lost and that which is there, is often poorly explained. I blamed myself on my initial watch for often being confused at what was happening but now after watching again while familiar with the source material I don't feel the show really does a good job of setting up the political background and bounces from one extreme to another either name dumping with no context or flanderization such as Nilfgaard = Nazis. I would never expect a Movie or Tv show to be able to capture or match everything from a book series where the only limit is the readers imagination but was very surprised how I much preferred nearly all the voice acting and visual aesthetics of the video games compared to the show, from the creature design to the Nilfgaardian armour to the sense of character I think the games does it all better. The acting here overall isn't great, although I do like Cavil as Geralt. Overall I still think the first season was decent and I did still enjoy it and hopefully pretends better to come but can't say it particularly succeeds either as an adaption of the first two witcher books or as a particularly well crafted piece of television.