Fantasy drama-starved TV viewers, many still mourning the loss of HBO’s Game of Thrones, may have found a new obsession – the Netflix show The Witcher, which debuted on the streaming service last week.

The show’s reception – with its audience if not with critics – may also give a boost to the producers and backers of a slew of fantasy shows set to hit TV screens over the next few years as eager executives hope to replicate the global smash of Game of Thrones.

Based on a series by the Polish novelist Andrzej Sapkowski, the eight-episode The Witcher is currently listed as Netflix’s highest-rated original series on IMDb, a ranking that means it beat out Stranger Things, Peaky Blinders, Black Mirror, The Crown, Ozark and Haunting of Hill House.

The fantasy show was created by Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, whose credits include The West Wing and Parenthood, and is filmed in Hungary, Poland and the Canary Islands. It concerns Geralt of Rivia, a medieval mutant monster hunter with supernatural abilities played by Henry Cavill, with a cast that includes a sorceress, Yennefer of Vengerberg, and a princess named Ciri.

The show’s success surprised critics who compared it unfavorably with Game of Thrones, with the New York Times describing it as a generic version of George RR Martin’s sword, sorcery, sex and dwarfism epic, despite being derived from a character in a Polish science fiction magazine published in the mid-1980s.

“Armies gathering in the south to attack northern kingdoms. Dragons threatened with extinction. A magic tree. Softcore nudity. Eastern European locations. The arbitrary circling about of the main characters to delay a prophesied meeting,” the reviewer began, before noting that the Witcher “is a big silent softy who agonizes over the monsters he dispatches”.

Others worried that The Witcher would “not thrive on high production values alone” (Time), while Entertainment Weekly called the show “terrible”. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 53% rating to an audience average of 93%.

But viewers have taken another opinion. Last weekend, The Witcher showed a rating of 9.1/10 from over 23,000 users, while #Witcher and #WitcherNetflix have trended on Twitter.

At a minimum, the positive audience response to The Witcher confirms the entertainment hole that Game of Thrones left, and consumers’ desire to return to realms of epic fantasy, where princes and princesses and monsters abound.

That is encouraging news to TV, film and streaming service production houses scrambling to fill the HBO hit’s absence after eight seasons with new, highly rendered fantasy epics.

HBO and Martin have already confirmed several GoT spinoffs, while Amazon is set to spend close to $1bn to make a five-season series based on JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which became a movie franchise monster.

A scene from The Witcher. Photograph: Katalin Vermes/Netfilx

The Lord of the Rings retread – technically a prequel – is being made under tight control by Amazon with the approval of Tolkein’s family, who were paid a reported $250m for the rights. Few details have been confirmed beyond that there will be 20 episodes in the first season and Star Trek Beyond writers JD Payne and Patrick McKay would develop and serve as executive producers.

Last month, Deadline confirmed that the retail giant had already ordered a second season.

But the search for fantasy is not limited to Tolkien. HBO has reportedly ordered a series based on Martin’s book Fire & Blood. The series will be set 300 years before Game of Thrones and centers on the Dance of Dragons, an episode in the Targaryen civil war.

Beyond that, Netflix has purchased the rights and commissioned The Chronicles of Narnia as well as Cursed, a 10-part retelling of the legend of King Arthur through the perspective of the Lady of the Lake based on a forthcoming fantasy novel by Tom Wheeler.