The Witcher Review

The first season has a real structural problem and one great idea. The problem is that it runs three timelines decades apart without telling the audience, so a viewer new to the material spends eight hours confused about whether characters have met. The idea is the third episode, a self contained job about a cursed princess in a crypt that is the closest the show ever gets to the short stories it came from, all bargaining, folklore and physical horror.

Henry Cavill is genuinely committed, playing a man of very few words with enormous physical precision, and the song about tossing a coin became inescapable for a reason. Anya Chalotra is strong in a role the writing keeps reinventing. It declines steadily. Battles get bigger and cheaper looking, political factions multiply beyond anyone's ability to care, the tone lurches between grim fantasy and quippy adventure, and the departure of its star over reported disagreements about fidelity to the novels left the series without the one element nobody disputed.