Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ On HBO, Steven Moffat’s Adaptation Of The Hit Romance Sci Fi Novel

We always find it amazing when film and TV producers take repeated stabs at adapting books that are inherently complex. How many versions of Dune have there been, for instance, with each filmmaker thinking they’ve unlocked the secret to making a cohesive and coherent screen narrative? Another book that is like that is Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. None other than Steven Moffat has decided to give it a go, making a six-part series 13 years after a movie adaptation was released.

THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A readheaded woman in a sweater talks to a camera. “Why is love intensified by absence?” Then a grey-haired man responds to a question by repeating it: “How does it feel? Normal, you know? Like nothing.”

The Gist: What the man, Henry DeTamble (Theo James) is describing is a genetic anomaly that makes him travel through time. The only problem is that he never knows when he’s going to disappear, when and where he’ll land, and when he gets sent back home. What he does know is that he arrives naked and feeling sick, which means he’s gotten good at three things: “Running, fighting and stealing.”

His wife, the former Claire Abshire (Rose Leslie), has learned to live with it, mainly because Henry has been a part of her life since she was a little kid. We flash back to when she was around 6 (Everleigh McDonell), bringing out a set of her father’s clothes for her “imaginary friend” who appeared to her in the woods; he stayed behind a tree because he was naked. He’s seen her before, at other times of her life, and he tells her the exact days when he’ll show up again.

But when we next see Claire, she’s in an art program in college. When she goes to the library to look up a Chaucer book, she finds that one of the librarians is.. a younger, hunkier version of the Henry she’s known for 14 years. Because he’s not at the point where he started seeing young Claire, he has no idea who she is. But because she knows about his “illness,” they bond immediately, and they go to his messy single-guy apartment.

We then flash back to 28-year-old mentoring the kid version of himself (Jason David) the first time he time traveled, to the museum he was at earlier in the day. After both travel back to their present times, Henry mugs a man on a date for his suit and flowers, and goes to his date with Claire. But after they sleep together, she finds out he has a girlfriend, at which point the 36-year-old Henry, the version Claire knows the best, visits both of them to tell them both to hang in there.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Every time we talk about time travel, we seem to bring up Quantum Leap, but The Time Traveler’s Wife is actually the most analogous to how time travel was handled on that show.

Our Take: Steven Moffat’s series adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s hit novel of the same name is the second screen version; a film with Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana was released in 2009. But Moffat brings his sense of quippy whimsy that people know from his previous shows, like Doctor Who, Sherlock and Coupling. But with that wryness comes a problem: The show is so enamored with its own cleverness that it fails to lay out the rules of the game for people who aren’t familiar with the novel or the movie.

We’re not saying that it had to introduce us to Henry and Claire in a linear way; Henry’s life isn’t linear, so why should his story be? But there are so many layers to how he interacts with Claire at different ages, much less how he interacts with himself at different ages, that a bit more exposition might have been necessary here. For instance, Claire remembers older Henry telling her that an older guy mentored him about his time-traveling skills, and 28-year-old Henry tells young Henry the same thing. How does he not realize that the “older guy” was him? At some point, he must have realized that, right?

But there’s also the matter of how older Henry knows the exact dates that he’s going to zap back into little Claire’s life. Is it because the younger versions of him arrive on those dates, so he knows about them already? How did 28-year-old Henry get to that certain point in life without knowledge of Claire?

There are other clues around that show that things do change when he jumps back and forth, but for now they’re too subtle to really take note of.

What is this show, though? Is it sci fi or romance? It can be both, of course, but are we examining how Claire and Henry’s relationship developed and how his time-travel affects it, or is it about the time travel itself? There’s such a wide range of places to go, we’re not sure if either aspect of the story will be adequately covered in the series’ six episodes.

Rose Leslie shines as Claire, mainly because she has a more linear story to latch onto. Claire knew Henry when she was young, reconnected with him in college, then built a life with him — an unusual life, but a life nevertheless. Theo James’ performance is more problematic. He underplays Henry in places; he acts as if what’s happening to him is no biggie even though every landing puts him in some sort of peril. It’s almost as if the arrogant charmer that’s the 28-year-old version of him translates to the other times in his life.

So what we feel we’re facing are scenes where different versions of Henry appear and disappear and see what goes on from their particular perspectives. That might be fun for a couple of hours, but not six, especially when Moffat appears to be more in love with his own words than laying out a coherent and cohesive timeline.

Sex and Skin: College Claire and long-haired Henry have sex, but there’s no nudity. We do see Henry’s bare butt whenever he lands somewhere.

Parting Shot: Long-haired Henry finds that a piece of himself– his feet — has time traveled to an alley by where Claire is stewing and talking to older Henry. Since we saw that his baby tooth time travels, we’re left to wonder how he got into a situation where his feet did the same.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Theo James’ trainer, who had to prepare him to look ripped in multiple scenes whenever Henry transports to and from different times.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I grew up waiting for you,” 20-year-old Claire tells older Henry. “I formed my life around you.” Ugh. Sounds like Henry spent 14 years grooming Claire, doesn’t it? We certainly hope that’s not the case, but the implications are kind of skeevy.

Our Call: SKIP IT. There’s nothing about this new version of The Time Traveler’s Wife that hooked us in so we could take this romantic ride with Henry and Claire. It doesn’t help that the show is cheekier than it really needs to be.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.