There are a lot of cool things that come with working on a fantasy TV series like The Witcher or Game of Thrones. The cool costumes come to mind, or Geralt working with a sword. But there are pitfalls to filming a fantasy series. Namely, the details matter, and recently Showrunner Lauren S. Hissrich revealed that her series The Witcher narrowly avoided its own Game of Thrones coffee cup catastrophe.
According to Lauren S. Hissrich, the creative team was in the editing room a few weeks ago, when one of her staff noticed something in a shot that shouldn’t have been there: car headlights. Not a normal sight when most people in The Witcher’s world are being transported by horse, carriage, and occasionally magic. When asked specifically about incidents similar to GOT’s infamous coffee cup, she said:
No, I mean, it’s interesting. I was in VFX a couple of weeks ago, and someone’s keen eyes – we were watching something for something else, and someone said, ‘Are those car headlights?’ And you’re like, ‘Yep, those are car headlights.' There are not a lot of cars in The Witcher. So, you know, the good news is that by the time an episode makes it to air, hundreds of people have watched it. And so we hope that there is nothing like that.
Given the seeming popularity of The Witcher during its first weekend on Netflix, you just know that if those headlights had actually made it into the episode in question, there would have been memes all over the Internet in the days that followed.
As it stands, we’re instead getting memes like this:
Although Hissrich also told Games Radar the show always “hope[s]” to avoid these kinds of issues, ultimately, most shows make mistakes. The Game of Thrones error in question was so blatant that later the powers that be at HBO actually had the team go in and fix the coffee cup mistake. Although I’m sure images of the minor snafu will live on forever.
Recently, another streaming show The Mandalorian on Disney+ got caught with a boom mic in the background, also earning flack for the error. Fantasy and sci fi fans are tough critics, man. They don’t want any modern-day shenanigans showing up in their immersive worlds!
These shows have proven that even the keenest of observers can always miss minor details. At the end of the day, though, The Witcher avoided those headlights. Which means we can instead focus on all those times Henry Cavill did his own stunts in the new show.
The Witcher is streaming now on Netflix. I’m not sure which episode nearly incorporated car headlights, but there are eight episodes of the series so far, and the show has already been renewed for Season 2.
