The Real Reason Netflix's The Witcher Toned Down Nude Scenes After Season 1
Netflix's "The Witcher" is and has always been a fantasy adventure series made for adults. That's particularly clear in its debut season, which features so much violence and nudity that it firmly cemented the show's place as one of Hollywood's many potential "Game of Thrones" successors when it premiered in 2019. However, as the "Witcher" universe has expanded over the past few years, the franchise's core show has also lessened its focus on nudity and sex. According to its creator, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, that's a result of the direction its story has taken since it premiered.
While discussing the plot of "The Witcher" Season 2 in a 2021 interview with Digital Spy, Hissirch said, "The story is much more about the evolution of a family. And so we didn't need to have a lot of sex. We didn't need to have a lot of nudity." She acknowledged the series' lower number of overall nude scenes, adding, "I think you feel it as a whole in the show. But as soon as you think about what the stories are, you think: where would that have been? It would have been gratuitous, because we would have thrown it in there to be sexier, or to have people talk."
The "Witcher" creator seems resolute in her belief that she'd rather the series have no nude scenes than ones that don't make sense within the context of its story. As she put it in her interview with Digital Spy, "That's just not of interest to me." Since she spoke with the outlet, Hissrich has stuck to her word, too. "The Witcher" Season 3, notably, contains very little nudity — even in its sex scenes, which feature mostly clothed characters.
The Witcher's creator believes the show's nude scenes should be 'story-driven'
To Lauren Schmidt Hissrich's credit, "The Witcher" isn't the only noteworthy fantasy show meant for adult audiences to feature increasingly fewer nude scenes season to season. Like the Netflix series' first season, HBO's "Game of Thrones" famously featured a lot of nudity throughout its time on the air. However, as explicit and violent as that show often was, viewers also noted with interest how its number of nude scenes decreased in its later seasons.
As has been the case with "The Witcher," that was largely because the series' story gradually evolved until there weren't nearly as many narrative opportunities or reasons for its characters to have sex. The decreased reliance on nudity in the final seasons of "Game of Thrones" didn't, however, stop many from continuing to discuss how gratuitous and unnecessary some of its sex scenes were, which is one thing that Hissrich wants to avoid with "The Witcher."
"I feel the same way about sex, nudity, violence, and all of those things, that they have to be story-driven," she explained in her interview with Digital Spy. "I think that using those things to shock audiences is a really cheap way for a writer to get attention to a specific scene." Taking her comments into account, it sounds like fans of "The Witcher" can rest easy knowing that any future nude scenes that occur on the show won't feel out of place. They'll only be included if they, as Hissirch says, organically fit within the series' ongoing story.