A vampire and a witch fall for each other over a stolen manuscript in Oxford, and the show built around them never quite decides whether it wants to be a thriller or a romance. A Discovery of Witches ran for three seasons and 25 episodes, starting on Sky One on 14 September 2018 and ending on Sky Max on 18 February 2022. It is adapted from Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy, named after the first book, and produced by Bad Wolf and Sky Studios. Kate Brooke created it.
The premise is a good one. Diana Bishop is a historian and a reluctant witch who finds a bewitched manuscript in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The book drags her back into magic. Matthew Clairmont is a centuries-old vampire and a biochemist who offers to help her. Witches and vampires have mistrusted each other for a long time. They team up anyway, protect the book, and try to solve what is inside it while other creatures come after them.
Trailer, via Sky TV.
Teresa Palmer and Matthew Goode
Teresa Palmer plays Diana, and Matthew Goode plays Matthew. The two carry the series, and they have to. Much of the show’s pull is the slow, forbidden thing between a witch and a vampire who are not supposed to want each other. Goode is the more interesting of the two, because Matthew has had centuries to get tired and Goode lets that show. Palmer has the harder job. Diana spends much of the run being told what she is and what she can do, and Palmer has to make a woman who keeps getting pushed around still look like the one in charge of her own story.
The supporting cast is deep. Alex Kingston plays Sarah Bishop. Edward Bluemel is Marcus Whitmore. Malin Buska is Satu Järvinen. Aiysha Hart is Miriam Shepherd. Gregg Chillin is Domenico Michele, and Trevor Eve plays Gerbert. Peter McDonald plays Baldwin Montclair, Adelle Leonce plays Phoebe Taylor, Jacob Ifan plays Benjamin Fuchs, and Olivier Husband is Fernando Gonçalves. That is a lot of names, and the show does not always know what to do with them.
25 episodes, three seasons
The first series ran eight episodes, weekly, from 14 September 2018. Sky One renewed it in November 2018 for a second and third run. The second series was ten episodes, released in full on 8 January 2021 before airing weekly. The third and final series was seven episodes, released in full on 7 January 2022 and aired weekly on Sky Max after Sky One shut down.
That release pattern matters more than it sounds. Dropping a whole season at once rewards a show that can hold a binge, and A Discovery of Witches mostly can. The weekly airing that followed made the weaker stretches harder to forgive. Here is how the three runs stack up:
- Season 2 (2021) — the strongest. Ten episodes, a new setting, and the romance finally has somewhere to go.
- Season 1 (2018) — the cleanest premise. Eight episodes, Oxford, the manuscript, and the two leads circling each other.
- Season 3 (2022) — the weakest. Seven episodes to close a trilogy, and it feels like it.
The problem across all three is the mystery itself. The manuscript is the engine of the whole thing, and the show is stingy with what is actually inside it. Diana is a historian, which should make her the perfect person to crack a book. Instead she spends long stretches reacting — to Matthew, to her aunts, to the creatures who want the book for themselves. The show keeps promising answers and then handing out another meeting.
What the creature politics cost
The creature-world politics are where A Discovery of Witches loses its footing. There are witches, vampires and daemons, and a whole hidden order that governs them. The show wants that order to feel dangerous. It mostly feels like paperwork. Gerbert and Domenico Michele are set up as threats, and Baldwin Montclair as a family problem for Matthew, but the series rarely makes the stakes land the way the romance does.
What works is simpler. A witch who does not want to be one, and a vampire who has been alive too long, in a library, over a book neither of them can leave alone. When the show trusts that, it is good. When it cuts away to a council meeting, it is not.
The casting is the show’s real strength, and it is worth saying plainly. Goode and Palmer are the reason to start. Kingston and Bluemel are the reason to keep going when the plot stalls. A series like this lives or dies on whether you want to spend 25 episodes with these people, and mostly you do.
The score
The published critical score for A Discovery of Witches is 6.7 out of 10, with a Metacritic mark of 67 out of 100. That feels right, and it is not a knock. This is a show with a strong central pair, a clean hook and a real atmosphere, dragged down by a mystery it refuses to solve and a political subplot that never earns its screen time.
The comparison that matters is to what came before it. A Discovery of Witches arrived in 2018, deep into a run of fantasy adaptations built on books with devoted readers, and it did the hard part well: it cast the two leads correctly. That is not a small thing. Plenty of shows in this lane get the world right and the people wrong. This one gets the people right and the world fuzzy.
So the verdict is a qualified yes. Watch the first series for the Oxford stretch and the two leads. Watch the second for the payoff. The third is there to finish the job, and it finishes it. But the manuscript at the center of A Discovery of Witches is never as interesting as the two people chasing it, and a show that knows that should have spent less time on the creatures who want it and more on the witch and the vampire who found it.
6.7 of 10.
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