Time After Time After Time…

In 1979, Warner Brothers quietly released a film that garnered respectable box office receipts and became one of my favorites: Time After Time.  The “what if” story by Karl Alexander and Nicholas Meyer was based on a straightforward conceit: What if H. G. Wells had actually built a time machine, and what if Jack the Ripper escaped to modern times in such a machine?  The summer movie featured Malcolm MacDowell (recovering from his portrayal of the titular character in Caligula) as Wells, David Warner as John Leslie Stevenson/Jack the Ripper, and Mary Steenburgen as bank clerk Amy Robbins.  Much of the film was shot on location in San Francisco – a city which would soon take a larger role in my life. 

How to categorize Time After Time?  Was it science-fiction?  Steampunk?  Romance?  Humor? Social commentary?  Action adventure?  All of the above, superbly mixed by fledgling director Meyers and brought to life by a cast for whom the chemistry – particularly between MacDowell and Steenburgen, who were married a year later – was real. 

With the combination of genres and the popularity of time travel stories, it should have been inevitable that a TV adaptation would be in the offing.  It’s taken 37 years, but ABC aired its pilot for Time After Time this past Sunday.

Sad to say, I was rather disappointed.  In every level, ABC’s version is markedly inferior to the 1979 movie. 

Most of the plot from the movie version is recycled for the pilot - some dialog is repeated verbatim.  No surprise there as Nicholas Meyer, who co-wrote and directed the film, is credited with the screenplay.  But much of the charm of the movie, which resulted from Wells’ frequent “fish out of water” moments, has been discarded here.  To be sure, in both versions Wells is awed by modern technology.  But in many ways he seems too contemporary in the reboot.  Even Wells’ English is curiously in sync with our time.  Particularly with Wells’ frequent use of the word “okay” – a term which simply did not exist for the British of the 19^th Century.

As television is often filmed on a very rushed schedule and it takes actors several episodes to settle into their characters (Leonard Nimoy’s turn as Spock is a prime example of this), it will take several more weeks to accurately assess the casting.  So far, Freddie Stroma is charming as the naïve younger Wells.  The other actors don’t yet bring much beyond physical beauty to their role.  It remains to be seen whether Josh Bowman can bring the menace and latent self-revulsion to the role of Jack the Ripper that David Warner did.  So far, he’s just a handsome young man with a set of knives.  Much of the characterization will require collaboration between the actors and writers. 

Even the special effects, which are so easily achievable compared to 1979, suffer in comparison.  Take, for example, the all-important time travel sequence.  In 1979, it was achieved by animation accompanied by recordings of events as Wells traveled forward through time: a newsboy shouting a headline about World War I, a bit of the Charleston, FDR’s “the only thing we have to fear”, Hitler shouting, World War II, the assassinations of the 1960s, etc.  The effects were hardly state of the art, even for 1979, but they conveyed to the viewer what Wells experienced during his journey.   The TV version?  The windows of H. G.’s time machine ice-up, and suddenly he’s in a new era.    

Pilots can often be unreliable indicators of how a show will evolve.  Neither of Star Trek’s two pilots look or feel much like the show it would become.  The Munsters, Star Trek, and All in the Family went through several changes between pilot and regular season.  Despite my initial disappointment, I will continue watching Time After Time, at least for this season.