TIME AFTER TIME
Legendary author HG Wells lives his novels in new TV show Time After Time
HG Wells hunts the Ripper again.
There’s been a surge of new television dramas based around time travel of late, including Legends Of Tomorrow, Timeless and Frequency. But one in particular borrows from recent history for its own premise. Time After Time, from Scream creator Kevin Williamson, is actually an updating of a 1979 novel and film of the same name, that suggested author HG Wells actually used a time machine to keep Jack the Ripper from murdering in the future.
The Wrath Of Khan’s Nicholas Meyer directed Malcolm McDowell as Wells in
the 1979 movie version – a film that had a profound impact on Williamson. “I’m a huge fan,” Williamson tells Red Alert. “The movie changed my life when I was a kid.” Which is why, in this era of remaking popular properties for new generations, Time After Time is getting reborn as an episodic TV show.
Williamson says it’s actually coincidence that their series seems to be jumping on a time-hopping bandwagon with other likeminded shows. “When you start to develop a show, you never think someone else is developing another time travel show,” he sighs. “So we have to look at what sets us apart, which is we have time travel as an element in the show, but it’s really conceived to be about the young HG Wells (Freddie Stroma). We don’t time travel so much in the first 12 episodes. I think it’s four times,” he says. “What happens [in our show] is we get into the other books of HG Wells. We show the inspiration for the books he is going to go back and write.”
So while a lot of the original premise remains, with Wells chasing his colleague John Stevenson, aka Jack the Ripper (Josh Bowman), into contemporary times to bring him back to their own era, the TV series narrative will explore new narrative paths and character arcs. “One of the things I love about HG Wells is, thematically, the way that he often wrote of the good and bad in human nature and how it relates to technology,” Williamson explains. “That’s one of the things that I was inspired by now, as opposed to doing this [series in] any other time, because we live in a world where we are ruled by our little gadgets in our hand. That’s how we live and breathe now, and it inspires the good and the bad in us.”
Williamson says the cat-and-mouse between the two men will become vastly more complex
in the series. “John Stevenson is a decorated surgeon who ran in the same sort of circles with HG Wells back in 1893. In our universe, he’s secretly Jack the Ripper. One of the things we’re doing with this show is creating a mythology that in the first episode is very faithful to the movie. But in the second and third hours, we start laying the seeds for a large mythology of science fiction where Jack the Ripper comes to modern-day New York, looks around, and he feels like, ‘Oh, I’m not so special here. There’s one of me on every corner.’ So he starts to set out for a new identity.”
As in all time travel-themed stories, one question eventually comes up: if you could time travel and go anywhere you want, would you try to change history, or attempt to be someone else? Williamson says the series will explore that. “Stevenson is a psychopath, and he’s evil, and that’s where we launch into some of the themes of HG Wells’s other books, where he starts talking to Griffin, for instance, in The Invisible Man, where he’s this narcissistic sociopath and this isolated epitome of evil. So we take John Stevenson and send him on a character arc of redemption. But along the way, it gets even worse for him.”
If it all sounds very dark, don’t fret. Everything is tempered with the romance that
We show the inspiration for the books HG Wells is going to go back and write
carries over from the original story, as Wells falls for the very modern Jane (Génesis Rodríguez). However, Williamson says their path will be far more complicated in the series. “They reach a tableau where they have to stop it because it’s a doomed relationship,” he admits. “Wells’s ultimate goal is to return to 1893, and write his books, so she’s going to have to say goodbye to him. But we learn about Jane and that she comes from a family of loss. It will be interesting to see how a woman like that, when a man needs her, how she connects to it.” But fear not, Williamson says there’s plenty to be hopeful about in terms of their ultimate outcome that is even teased in her very name. “We chose [the character name] Jane because Wells nicknamed his wife Jane. Now was it because she went back with him, or that she stayed in present day and it was his only way to remember her? There’s your endgame and the final episode of the series,” he laughs.
Time After Time is airing now on ABC in the US.