I miss when The Witcher was Netflix’s monster-of-the-week show

polygon.com:

Netflix’s The Witcher is approaching yet another inflection point. The show has gone through many changes over the years, but it’s coming up against its biggest one yet: life after Henry Cavill, with Liam Hemsworth coming in to play Geralt for the fourth season. And it’s an opportunity to return to what brought the show success in the first place.

The Witcher got off to a running start as a series that used monster encounters and fantasy devices to create compelling episodic television that supported the larger world it was building. Sure, there was a larger story, but Geralt’s early stories (and Yen’s, and Ciri’s) were defined by the dangerous encounters and gnarly creatures they had to overcome in each episode.

Then, the show’s second season moved closer to Game of Thrones imitation, sacrificing some of the episodic monster hijinx in favor of the broader story it was trying to tell. And the third season, unfortunately, fully embraced that direction, going heavy on Witcherlore and opaque political plots instead of the simple pleasures of Geralt grunting at and then slaughtering some ghoulish foes.

There are moments of monster mashing in the third season, of course: The flesh monster is a standout, as is the attack on the ship later in the season. But these feel like sparse punctuation moments within the less compelling larger story of The Witcher season 3, rather than climactic moments within an episode dedicated to the tension and mystery around the monster’s existence and threat.

While I’m generally in the camp of We have too many long movies masquerading as TV shows and we should return to more episodic TV, that’s not the only reason I think The Witcher should embrace its upcoming reset as an opportunity to change