The executive producer on Netflix’s The Witcher has blamed American audiences and social media sites such as TikTok for…
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Look at this clown! First, they came out saying they weren’t even fans of the material. You have Henry Cavil in the lead role who is a super fan of the source materials arguing with you and the writers about the show. And then you finish it off by blaming the audience for your decisions. Mind you, the audience you have ultimately attracted is largely influenced by the decisions you have made throughout the production of YOUR show. The audience didn’t make this show, YOU did
Yeah, right.
I don’t think any American was like “wow I want a shittier version of the Witcher to watch, that’d be sooo great!”
American test audiences literally said that for I Am Legend which combined with studios unopinionated cowardice caused them to ruin the ending, amongst many, many, many other times that test audiences have given bad artistic feedback.
His anger should probably be focused at the showrunner / studio, but I’m guessing he’s not risking burning those bridges so is instead blaming the only other party in the decision making process, the test audiences.
Judging by your other claim in this thread that Americans have a 20% illiteracy rate, as an American here’s a 20% effort response:
Hurpdurp what’s i am legend gotta do with witchermans durrr
You do have a 20% illiteracy rate, and the response is that American test audiences have ruined very obviously good plots with their stupidity many times before.
Help, my literacy rate goes down every time I read your comments. Now, I can only communicate this way:
❔️🤔📖
The games and books seemed to do just fine in America lol
The Witcher 3 is one of the best selling games ever, and is considered by critics and fans alike to be one of the best games of its genre ever. This guy is a fucking clown.
Yes, came here to say this. Thank you for your services. American executive never own any failures. Claw back their bonuses, fucking brain piece of shits can’t even do their jobs anymore.
This is a Polish executive. You’re just parroting other’s opinions.
Well good to know that not only Americans suck this bad… kinda refreshing actually. Either why is u hurt tho?
Yep lol it’s laughable. Love your user icon, I use the N7 icon for a lot of different services.
Thanks! Mass Effect is in my top three game franchises (the other two being Witcher and Elder Scrolls).
Yea but that’s only because the game has lots of pretty, moving pictures. And the books have pretty covers.
I’m American, so I can’t even read. I noticed some symbols in the show that could be conceived as trying to impart words or ideas, and it just turned me right off.
You might be asking yourself: “If I can’t read, then how did I understand and respond to this topic?”, and I would then respond: “SHUT UP VOICES IN MY HEAD!”
Great comment, but could have used a more realistic scenario of using a screen reader/dictation software to comment. It’s okay though, I get that you needed to simplify it for the American audiences.
This reads like a Dave Attell stand-up act lol
“we want to make more money so we dumbed down the plot to idiot level and blame it on americans being dumb. Also we changed everything to be more emotional because that’s what tiktoks kids want, more emotion and less plot or something”
Guy sounds like a twat.
He’s a guy that is hitting excel spreadsheet metrics from past shows, wondering why his metrics aren’t appealing to people.
Yeah, blame your customers.
Simplifying is really different from what they did which is completely alter characters, unnecessarily kill off characters, introduce new plots that didn’t exist, etc. The Lord of the Rings movies, and the recent Dune movie both did a lot of that but are considered fantastic adaptations. Even Game of Thrones was an excellent adaptation for the first ~5 seasons and had huge mass market appeal while still being complex.
This is just shitty writers making excuses.
We made it this way because you’re stupid. Also, if you don’t like it, you’re stupid.
No wonder it turned out to be a pile of dogshit.
This is the kinda guy that would yell at parking sign for smashing into his car.
It’s worse, he’s smashing his face with it and yet refuses to acknowledge the parking sign while complaining about some other imaginary obstacle instead.
If it were true that Americans & social media wanted such simplified plot, it would have been more successful than it was.
I know everyone thinks I’m a brittle American, but I’m kind of sick of everyone blaming Americans for choices that are made by people who think poorly of Americans.
I’m pretty sick of Americans feeling picked on.
You have an illiteracy rate of like 20%. Make a real public school system and then we’ll talk.
@masterspace All right, so I was interested in the statistic so I looked it up and 20% of Americans are at Level 1 literacy or below according to Wikipedia… which means that actually a lower number than that is functionally illiterate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
And out of curiosity I looked up Canada. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/literacy 22% Level 1 or below.
Allowing for margin of error, your public school system sucks just as much as ours. So go milk a moose in French.
Being creepy by stalking my past conversations instead of arguing the point at hand, and ironically furthering my point by mistakenly using a study on Canada from 1989.
Our current (2013) sub-level 1 literacy rate is around 4%: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/89-555-x/2013001/t/tbl1.1-eng.htm
No, our public education systems are not equivalent even if that makes you feel bad.
Stalking your past convos? No. I saw you were from lemmy.ca and therefore Canadian. Then I did a search for the 20 percent statistic and of course Wikipedia came up.
I don’t feel bad. I know our school system sucks because of a lot of systemic problems. I do think your education is not as great as you think it is if you simplify the 20% statistic to full illiteracy and if you think a random person on kbin needs to set up a new public school system before she can have an opinion.
That’s before we unpack the idea that literacy=intelligence, which is not always the case.
I do feel a bit bad about the stalking accusation. I didn’t realize the ability to see your server in the automatic kbin reply setup combined with the esoteric knowledge of how to use Duck Duck Go would frighten you, Mr Better Educated Than Me. We can stop if this is too much for your heart. This weather can be tough on the body and I know you guys aren’t well-versed in heat safety.
if you think a random person on kbin needs to set up a new public school system before she can have an opinion.
You’re allowed to have an opinion, if your opinion is that you feel like America is picked on for being too dumb in this context then I would suggest that you need some strong evidence to persuade people that literacy is not a proxy for education, or more specifically, the ability to hold more complicated medieval fantasy plots together.
And I am well aware of our flaws, our literacy rate is 1.25x the OECD average which is shameful. I’m just not false equivalencing that with America’s 6.33x. In fact if you remove America as the outlier dragging the OECD stats down we look even worse.
@masterspace So we’re helping you. I bet you feel bad about making fun of us now.
Punching down never feels good
@masterspace Oh go milk a moose.
Alternative headline “Person highly involved with making show blames anyone but themselves for failure”
You know that meme where the guy riding the bike sticks a crowbar in the tire? Yeah…
He’s really blaming the execs and showrunner between the lines I think. Saying she had to “make tough decisions” means “she fucked up”. It’s Netflix and the showrunner who think they need to go to the lowest common denominator with scripts to appeal to Americans, especially hard fantasy/sci-fi. So he’s kinda pissed at both groups really not just audiences.
It’s a shame because other works like GOT 1-5 show the opposite. Go for complex, go for the source material, and audiences will be patient for it.
Then blame execs and showrunners, not the audience. American audiences are savvier than he thinks, just because he had one pitch that didn’t fare well with American audiences doesn’t mean that they won’t embrace more complicated elements of The Witcher.
Plus it just sounds sad; blame audiences for something you, as a producer, can’t effectively produce.
He wasn’t showrunner, just EP on 16 episodes, and he can’t burn the showrunner or Netflix if he wants more work in the industry.
I didn’t say he was a showrunner.
- downpunxx ( @downpunxx@kbin.social ) 5•11 months ago
While I’ve enjoyed seasons past, including the animated bit they put out that one year, after watching an episode and a half of the first half of this last season 3 a couple things became clear, there are too many subplots/characters to the point that I simply tune out all the names and don’t care, focusing instead on the main three, and lastly that I’m bored. It’s become something tiresome, and I shut it off after a couple episodes, maybe I’ll revisit, probably not.
It doesn’t get better. S3 is so far detached from what season 1 brought to the table as to be mockery. The acting feels so forced in this one.
That’s a shame, but this kind of shit is why I cancelled my Netflix and never looked back.
Yeah same, I was really hoping the witcher show would turn out great but then when they first showed the nilfgaard armours before S1 I lost hope and my fear turned out to be justified.
Series Produced by
Jason F. Brown … executive producer (24 episodes, 2019-2023)
Steve Gaub … executive producer / co-producer (24 episodes, 2019-2023)
Tomasz Baginski … executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2023)
Sean Daniel … executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2023)
Lauren Schmidt Hissrich … executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2023)
Mike Ostrowski … executive producer / producer / co-executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2023)
Jaroslaw Sawko … executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2023)
Piotr Sikora … executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2023)
Simon Emanuel … consulting producer / executive producer (16 episodes, 2019-2021)
Matthew O’Toole … executive producer (16 episodes, 2021-2023)
Matthew Bouch … consulting producer (12 episodes, 2021-2023)
Katie Bullock-Webster … post producer (8 episodes, 2019)
Declan De Barra … supervising producer (8 episodes, 2019)
Ildiko Kemeny … co-producer (8 episodes, 2019)
Jenny Klein … co-executive producer (8 episodes, 2019)
Sneha Koorse … supervising producer (8 episodes, 2019)
David Minkowski … co-producer (8 episodes, 2019)
Suzie Shearer … line producer (8 episodes, 2019)
Mark Birmingham … co-producer (8 episodes, 2021)
Sean Guest … associate producer (8 episodes, 2021)
Sam J. Brown … associate producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Ben Burt … associate producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Javier Grillo-Marxuach … executive producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Haily Hall … co-producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Sasha Harris … producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Veselin Karadjov … line producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Tania Lotia … supervising producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Tera Ragan … co-producer (8 episodes, 2023)
Alik Sakharov … executive producer (7 episodes, 2019)
Kathy Lingg … executive producer (6 episodes, 2019)
Juan Cano Nono … Líne Producer Canary Islands (4 episodes, 2019)
Beau DeMayo … co-producer (2 episodes, 2019)
Stephen Surjik … executive producer (2 episodes, 2023)
Marc Jobst … consulting producer (1 episode, 2019)
Huh, the games did phenomenally well in America. Weird. /s
We’re in an age of knee-jerk finger pointing, with the problem getting worse the higher you get in society. It’s just one giant game of blame hot-potato.
Here’s the thing: The producers don’t owe the fans shit. They don’t owe the fans an explanation even. They owe the investors an explanation. The fans are just there, that’s the reality of being a fan of something. We don’t get a say, we just can choose to watch or not, and then decide to trash it or praise it online if we want to.
So while there’s a problem going up the ladder of the blame game, there’s another one coming back down the ladder, and it’s entitlement. For some odd reason there’s an air of “we deserve this content, exactly to our specifications” and it permeates games, movies, music, all of the entertainment content we have been inundated with as a society. And I think the culture generally leans towards encouraging it because it keeps the culture thriving. But it also keeps us in the exact status quo we’re in as a society, beholden to these billionaire publishers we all rail on daily.
Because let’s face it: We as a society spend an enormous amount of energy and as such, destroy a lot of the planet, on all this entertainment. If we can’t accept that as a fact then we’re fucking doomed.
So… the supply side matters but the demand side does not? Pfft.
If you make a thing that has an established fan base, and the fans are not happy, you screwed up. This isn’t a problem with fans, it’s a you problem. So how do you NOT screw up? You listen to the fans. Ideally, you hire people who are fans themselves.
Let’s analogize: say carrots are in high demand - people can’t get enough of them. And you tell everyone you have a big shipment of carrots coming in. And you set up a store called “Jim-Bob’s Carrot Emporium”, and people are lined up around the block… but it turns out the only thing you sell are potatoes… yeah, people are going to be pissed, and they will be justified, because you sold them a lie.
This is just damage control, there doesn’t have to be meaning to these words other than a try of appeasing the fans. That said though, it’s ironic how the Witcher games at least (haven’t read the books yet) have quite mature and well-written content compared to most other games, so they’re like the opposite of what he’s trying to say here and people LOVE the games for that. So it’s literally the opposite that’s true. If you put out over-simplified garbage, you will not create anything good with that kind of ingredients.