- The creator of Netflix's hit fantasy series, "The Witcher," posted to Reddit her pitch for the series that sold Netflix on her vision.
- But her original pitch was entirely different and was ultimately scrapped.
- Hissrich told Business Insider that her original pitch was to have Ciri as the narrator of the series and it would have followed her where she is in the book "The Lady of the Lake," the final book in the main "Witcher" saga.
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The creator of Netflix's "The Witcher," Lauren S. Hissrich, posted the pitch that sold Netflix on her vision for the series to Reddit on Saturday.
But that wasn't her original idea for the show.
Hissrich told Business Insider during an interview that her original pitch for the fantasy series, which was ultimately scrapped, "had a totally different storytelling mechanism."
"We would start with Ciri where she is in the book 'The Lady of the Lake' [the fifth and final novel in the main 'Witcher' book saga] and have her be our narrator, telling the story of Geralt and Yennefer and eventually herself, and how this family came together."
"That's something I played around with for a while, but then I realized there were a lot of things she wouldn't have knowledge of [as the narrator]," Hissrich added. "So very quickly that went away and we used timeline shifts to tell the story we wanted to tell."
Hissrich's pitch she posted to Reddit is more in line with where the series ended up.
The show follows three separate timelines and characters until they eventually collide. Ciri (who is played by Freya Allen) is one of the main characters, but Hissrich's original pitch would have put more of a spotlight on her. The other two main characters are Geralt, a monster hunter for hire known as a witcher (played by Henry Cavill), and Yennefer, a sorceress (Anya Chalotra).
"The non-linear storytelling in the short stories and saga are one of the franchise's most appealing elements to me," she wrote in the pitch she posted to Reddit. "The idea is that the three stories will run parallel to each other ... over the season, the stories will start to weave together."
"It took a bit of time to get to that version that I posted on Reddit," Hissrich told Business Insider. "There's obviously been a lot of debate about whether the timelines were successful, whether they were enjoyable or too challenging, but it remains one of the things I'm most proud of. I don't think I'd be able to tell the story any other way."
- Read more of Business Insider's coverage of "The Witcher":
- The top 8 TV shows that fans of Netflix's 'The Witcher' are watching
- Netflix's 'The Witcher' dethroned 'The Mandalorian' as the biggest TV series in the world
- Netflix's 'The Witcher' is one of the biggest shows in the US despite poor reviews from critics
