Fans of the fantasy hit The Witcher are thrilled that the second season of the epic series is finally returning to Netflix in just a few short days. With creator / showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich noting that they’d like to do at least seven seasons, though, we know that viewers shouldn’t harbor any Game of Thrones-ish worries about her extensive plans for the show.
While we’ve been given quite a bit of information about where The Witcher Season 2 will take Yennefer, Geralt, Ciri and their assorted allies and enemies, we’ve also already gotten a tease of death coming in Season 3, so it feels quite natural to look ahead and think of where else the show might go in upcoming seasons. There’s no guarantee right now that the series will run through Season 7, but any fantasy series that has a plan that long will certainly make people think of Game of Thrones, and how some later seasons didn’t quite fulfill the promises made early on for many fans.
Lauren Schmidt Hissrich announced her plan to keep the show going into Season 7 back before Season 1 even premiered, and when talking about her ideas for The Witcher’s potentially long run, told IGN:
It would be a straight translation of the books… I think there's just so much material that I don't feel the need to start inventing my own to keep it going.
And, there’s the rub, right? As Game of Thrones fans know all too well, the series was based on the acclaimed novels by George R.R. Martin, but he hadn’t finished his planned series by the time the show began. He also didn’t wrap it up during the show’s run, and still hasn’t (which really annoys a lot of people), so the showrunners ran out of stories to follow by the end of Season 5, when there were three more seasons to go.
Luckily, Schmidt Hissrich and her team will have an easier path, because the book series by Andrzej Sapkowski is already complete, so she sees no need to completely invent material just to keep The Witcher going for five additional seasons.
Even though the easiest course of action will be for Schmidt Hissrich to continue to follow the main storylines in those books (while peppering new things in here and there to keep fans of the novels on their toes), we all know that there’s now a whole Witcher universe being planned out for Netflix. And, the showrunner also noted that this will be a special boon for those who want more from the world:
I think that one of the beauties of building out a Witcher universe is that you can actually use those spin-offs to do slightly different things than the books did. But to me that actually makes it even more important that in the mothership series we always stick to what Sapkowski intended. To me, I just don't think it's my responsibility to continue those stories when he clearly felt there was a natural ending.
So, we can all expect Lauren Schmidt Hissrich to have The Witcher continue down a pretty set path, as the many planned spinoffs are more free to take the stories in brand new directions and explore other corners of the mythology that don’t quite fit within the story of the main series. Honestly, that sounds like a solid idea that can keep The Witcher well out of Game of Thrones territory in the future.
The Witcher returns to Netflix on December 17, so take a look at everything you need to remember before Season 2. For more to watch in the coming weeks, check out our guide to 2022 TV premiere dates!
