Tomasz Bagiñski on the criticism of “The Witcher”. “Viewers’ opinions are often in sync with what we think.”

The new season “appeared on December 17, and has since been ranked number one in the English-language series most watched on the platform. In the first days of the premiere, viewers spent 142,430,000 hours watching it, and from December 20 to 26 this number increased to 168 460,000 hours – similar to the rest of season 1. There have been a lot of changes in the way the narrative is conducted, different timelines have disappeared, there are also new threads and creative solutions that some believe are a good expansion and complement to what was going on in the first series, and according to others, they are not very fortunate.

Bagiński responds to the criticism of “The Witcher”

Already in an interview with Gazeta.pl, he emphasized that there are many changes in the new season, but in his opinion all of them can be safely defended by plot and emphasized that he was very pleased with the way the new season of “The Witcher” was released. He assured that he and other authors draw conclusions from what viewers write about their series and emphasized that these comments are very often consistent with what they have already figured out:

Even before the premiere, we watch these episodes many, many times – often even several dozen times – and then we have our own conclusions, what can be improved, what we want to change, what else we would like to do. When viewers’ opinions emerge, they are very often largely in sync with what we think and want to improve ourselves. Sometimes not, because of course opinions vary and it’s not that we take everything personally.

Nevertheless, in one of the last entries on his Facebook account, he also admitted that he read the comments about the new series in various parts of the network and was often surprised by them. Because although everyone on his profile still behaves culturally, in other places it gets much more unpleasant:

Until I wiped my glasses in amazement. What can you learn about yourself! Karol Paciorek urges me to finally have an operation and leave the glasses to the devil, but what would I rub then? Fortunately, the headlines in Poland have already been taken over by the coach of the football team, and this is where the anger of the omniscient and immaculate keyboard eagles focuses on him.

“Okay, when you do something in the light of public opinion, you have to take into account that not every bangla. I also get a lot of good opinions, a lot of support, thank you. We are discussing The Witcher, damn it, not some Star Wars. And this is something” – he added also in the same entry.

In an interview with Karol Paciorek, he explained that it is easy to criticize when you are not involved in a similar creative process and, as a rule, do not care too much about negative comments, because they lack a specific point of reference:

Nobody defended making their own series years ago and who knows, maybe someone could do something better, but it didn’t. (…) When someone sticks a pin in me, it rarely affects me. Sometimes, of course, something touches me, but let’s answer the question in relation to what? What are we comparing ourselves to? We compare ourselves to an imaginary ideal, some series that someone came up with in their head.

He also emphasized that many changes in the new season were introduced due to the votes of fans:

There is always a lot of criticism … we live this season many months before the premiere, we know what does not work and what can be pressed. Of course, such comments are taken into account for the future and efforts are made to improve some of these elements.

An interesting relationship in the ratings can also be seen on the Rotten Tomatoes website, which has been collecting information about series and movies for years, as well as compiling the opinions of viewers and professional critics. The new season of “The Witcher” was especially appreciated by the experts: based on their reviews, the production scored 94 percent, which is a very high rating.

Ratings for the 2nd season of ‘The Witcher’ Rotten Tomatoes / print screen

But there’s a leap in how viewer ratings stack up: here the rating is just 63 percent. However, it is enough to read the comments to see that you can see two opposite camps. Some people rate the series five stars, but there is also a large group so outraged by the changes that they only grant one point.