The Witcher has been renewed for its third season and will begin production soon; Credits: The Howler

Fantasy franchises are taking over the TV show scene. With Game of Thrones reaching a level of success never yet witnessed at the scale of the small screen, and Wheel of Time following in right after, there is a lot that can be amassed from fantasy shows. But none of these could be more distinct in style and craft than Lauren Schmidt Hissirch's The Witcher. Revealing what it is to be a female showrunner, the director said, “There's not a lot of women that have been in my role yet.”

The Witcher has already returned with its second season after a lot of public guesswork speculating if it would be making a return. The director has spent immense effort and time refining away her work and has now spent a considerable duration promoting it, too. But a work of art is not always perfect in the mind that originally renders it. While the audience does not stop gushing about remarkable season one of the show, the director has a few regrets about her work. 

Yet, the showrunner is glad for helming the show as she said, “What I’ve heard from a lot of women, and the thing that I feel myself is that I can find myself in this show.” She continued, “As a woman and as a person who loves fantasy, I often couldn’t find myself in other fantasy shows. I didn’t see a person that represented me, and how I walked through the world and how I saw the world.”

The series is based on the novel with the same title by Andrej Sapkowski and has also been abridged into a video game franchise. The show had first dropped on Netflix in 2019, and after two long years of the pandemic and the subsequent breaks from shooting, the series is finally able to make a comeback. "I had this deep concern that no one would care anymore,” said the director, talking about the pandemic affecting the series. “Just probably in the last two weeks, I’ve allowed myself to get excited about it again.”

While the audience had to wait for a long time for season two to drop by, the showrunner has already revealed that the series is in the production stage for its next season, and the series is ascending fast into the character development of Ciri, portrayed by Freya Allen. Talking about the aspects they overlooked in season one, the show-maker said, “I have to say that in season one, I don’t think that we paid enough attention to Ciri’s story. It’s one of my big regrets watching that season. And so we worked really hard this season to make sure that we felt like we were on the path a lot more with Ciri.”

Now that we know that season three will actually be dropping sometime soon, it is only fair that the audience knows how far along the show creators will take their audience for the ride. But the director has revealed, "We’re done writing season three, which is exciting. We will start production, God-willing, with the current state of the world, in 2022. And we’re just continuing rolling on, but the premiere of this season, I think, has become really key to that and people’s excitement around it. That’s what is keeping me going forward right now." 

However, if the Covid outbreak had not hindered it, Hissirch had already planned for several spinoffs, seasons, and episodes to do justice to the tale spun by Sapkowski. She revealed, "As soon as season one was a success, we started talking about how we might want to expand this universe. I’ve had these ideas of spinoffs and other stories that we could do because I knew that on the main Witcher — the mothership — we were gonna run out of room to engross ourselves in Sapkowski’s tales." 

But "COVID kind of blew a hole in all of that" and she revealed that she feared whether the audience would be "willing to wait 700 and something days, in order to see a second season." Fortunately, the series is once again on a better track right now. 

The director then shared what it was like to work on the piece of fiction in the novel, which had already garnered immense recognition due to the video games. "I feel like I was lucky that that path was laid down even before I got here. And I always think of the TV series as just another sort of way to tell the stories of this world," she said. "I was really terrified to adapt because it has these gorgeous, long character arcs and chapters that are just about Geralt and Tris and their friendship." 

Talking about her struggles about beginning the production on set again, she conceded, "I think that we had to sort of learn how to be a production again. You come back after a five-month shutdown, and you’ve been told other humans are dangerous to you." She added, "And at the same time, we’re trying to tell the cast and crew, “Come on back, we’ve been working for months to make this a safe production and here’s how we’re changing things, and here’s how we’re doing things.” 

Lauren Shmidtt Hissirch details her experience directing The Witcher as a female showrunner; Credits: Forbes

Yet, the whole ordeal with the pandemic made Hissirch feel better about her skills, and she concluded, "It was an enormous challenge that I feel mirrors exactly what we’re going through in the real world, all the time, you know? It was big, and it really brought a new appreciation for me of how to be a good leader."