Witcher Producer: Show’s Shit Viewership Is Because Of Dumb Americans And Social Media

There's nothing particularly novel when it comes to showrunners of media properties blaming all these damned kids and their internet for why their productions aren't as successful as they wanted. Everything from broadway productions to viewership of the damned Olympics have had young people and social media blamed for declining or terrible viewership/attendance numbers. In nearly every case where you dig into this, however, you find that this blame game is exactly that. Sometimes the product just sucks, or the proper marketing hasn't been undertaken, or the product just sucks, or you've misjudged what the audience wants, or the product just sucks.

Which brings us to Netflix's adaptation of The Witcher novels. The two-part season 3 finale aired recently to a roughly 30% viewership drop compared with its previous season. You can speculate as to the reasons for that drop. It could be that beloved actor, Henry Cavill, who plays the titular character in the series, will not be back for season 4. Or perhaps the writing for the show deviating from the novels put the audience off. Or perhaps the show's storyline was either too confusing or just not terribly interesting compared with previous seasons. Or perhaps show producer Tomek Baginski is right and the problem is that Americans, which make up a massive percentage of the audience for the show, are just too dumb for a more complicated plot, so they dumbed it down, and that somehow led to the show's viewership decline?

I had the same perceptual block when I presented Hardkor 44 [a never-made variation on the Warsaw Uprising] abroad years ago and tried to explain: there was an uprising against Germany, but the Russians were across the river, and on the German side there were also soldiers from Hungary or Ukraine," Baginski told Wyborcza. For Americans, it was completely incomprehensible, too complicated, because they grew up in a different historical context, where everything was arranged: America is always good, the rest are the bad guys. And there are no complications."

Baginski continued, saying simplifications of plot points are just as painful for writers as it is for viewers but oversimplifications to an otherwise nuanced and complex topic are often necessary" so that a show can reach a larger audience.

You should be able to see just how confused these statements are. Let me take you on a run-on sentence journey so you can see them all summarized together. Americans are too simple-minded to be able to handle a complicated plot, and they make up a huge part of the audience, so we dumbed the plot down for those idiots so we could appeal to a larger audience, except that audience is actually smaller, but that isn't the fault of the show, because of the Americans.

I'm far from a jingoist, but that's as befuddling a bit of logic as I've ever witnessed. Could be because I'm just an American idiot, to be sure.

But this also isn't Baginski's first foray into deflecting blame for his show's viewership decline.

In an interview with the Polish YouTube channelImponderabilia, Baginski singled out season two's low viewership as a byproduct of younger viewers who frequent social media sites like YouTube and TikTok for having short attention spans.

When it comes to shows, the younger the public is, the logic of the plot is less significant...Those people grew up on TikTok and YouTube, they jump from video to video," Baginsk said, adding that young folks gravitate more toward just emotions."

When the interviewer chimed in and said they were part of the age range of viewers Baginski was talking about, the producer replied saying Okay, so it's time to be serious. Dear children, what you do to yourself makes you less resilient for longer content, for long and complicated chains of cause and effect."

Which is exactly why there are no other analogue examples of successful shows that have complicated, long, saga-style content. Like Game of Thrones. Or The Expanse. Or Stranger Things. Oh, wait, all of those shows exist and are beloved both in America and abroad.

This blame game is silly. And, sure, you'll find plenty of times when I've called Americans dumb myself. And in some ways, we are. But the viewership numbers for The Witcher declining is almost certainly a self-inflicted wound.