‘Daredevil’ and ‘The West Wing’ writer is developing Netflix’s ‘The Witcher’

By Brad Jones December 11, 2017

witcher — Image used with permission by copyright holder

In May, Netflix announced plans to adapt The Witcher, a series of books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. Now, it’s been confirmed that the task of bringing the novels to the streaming service will fall to Lauren Schmidt Hissrich.

Hissrich has a longstanding relationship with Netflix, having served as an executive producer on both Daredevil and The Defenders. She also received writing credits for episodes of those two shows, as well as Power, Private Practice, and The West Wing, the series that helped her start her career in writing for television.

Not much is known about plans for Netflix’s take on The Witcher, save for the fact that it has been given a multiple-series order. Hissrich is set to serve as both an executive producer and the showrunner, according to Variety.

The Witcher is best known to audiences outside of Europe as a series of hit role-playing games developed by CD Projekt Red. However, these titles are set after the series of novels and don’t serve as a direct adaptation of Sapkowski’s work.

Indeed, the author has expressed some disdain for CD Projekt Red’s output, as critically acclaimed as it has proven to be. Sapkowski made no secret of his opinion of both the titles themselves – and the medium of video games as a whole – in an interview with Waypoint published earlier this year.

Still, the Netflix series is set to serve as something of a collaboration between the talent that made both the books and the games so compelling for fantasy fans. Sapkowski will serve as a creative consultant, while the director of the computer-generated intros for the CD Projekt Red adaptations, Tomasz Baginski, will direct at least one episode in each season.

It’s difficult to imagine just how Netflix’s The Witcher will play out — the success of Game of Thrones has proven that there’s an audience out there for epic fantasy, but The Witcher has a much greater emphasis on monsters from the outset than the early seasons of HBO’s hit series did. It remains to be seen whether the masses will catch on, but fans of the books and the games alike have plenty of reason to be excited.

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Brad is an English-born writer currently splitting his time between Edinburgh and Pennsylvania. You can find him on Twitter…

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