As the recent months have progressed, more and more of the Netflix Witcher original series has come together in its early stages of development. The new series made an important early first step late last year by hiring Lauren S. Hissrich to serve as showrunner, and very recently, the writing team was fully assembled with new recruits who wrote for the Marvel Netflix series Jessica Jones and Daredevil. This was confirmed by Hissrich with a tweeted photo showing the full team together, but the diversity of the writing staff prompted many fan concerns over Twitter. Now, the Witcher Netflix series showrunner has responded to this vocal minority.

I can't speak for other showrunners, but I do blind hiring, which means before I read a submission, I take off the cover page. I don't know if the writer is male, female, American, Polish, white, black, Latino, etc. I read the scripts. I put the ones I love the most in a pile.

— Lauren S. Hissrich (@LHissrich) May 8, 2018

Of the ten members of The Witcher series writing team, six are female and two members happen to be persons of color. This has increasingly become a factor of interest for big media projects, given the long history of largely caucasian and male writing teams in film and television. As such, several fans on Twitter suggested various worries related to the presence of minorites, such as the tweet seen above regarding the writers possibly making the team based on their ethnicity alone. Hissrich was quick to point out that her hiring processes were actually based on their submitted writing work, with the demographics of each writer unknown to her.

The answer is: I will not deviate from the books’ races and cultures, which means I WILL include minorities. The trap people fall into is equating “ minority” with skin color. (Note: people saw the writers’ room picture I tweeted and railed “Why so diverse?! Why no Europeans?!”

— Lauren S. Hissrich (@LHissrich) May 11, 2018

Another common worry was that the writing team would deviate from the source material with casting choices not reflective of the original Witcher stories. Hissrich pointed out that the races and cultures from the novels did include minorities, but that a mistake is often made by those who use the term “minority” to only indicate skin color. She also later mentioned in tweets that she has spoken at length with the original Witcher author about race in the Witcher world, and the inclusion of diverse races would line up with his original vision. Hissrich has not responded to each individual fan tweet, but it is delightful to see a showrunner being so open, calm, and intelligent with a fan community like this. Maybe now Geralt fans can rest easy in their bathtubs knowing that the tv series is in such good, careful hands. What do you guys think about these responses from The Witcher Netflix series showrunner? Let us know in the comments below!

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