time lords

Kevin Williamson plumbs HG Wells’s history for trippy TV series Time After Time

an often overlooked gem of late ’70s sci-fi cinema is Nicholas Meyer’s adaptation of Time After Time, Karl Alexander’s novel, which had HG Wells using his time machine to travel to then-modern day San Francisco to capture an escaped Jack the Ripper. Luckily Kevin Williamson, one of TV’s most successful executive producers (Scream, The Vampire Diaries) never forgot that movie…

“When I saw Nicholas Meyer’s movie, it had a meta sensibility which became my sensibility,” Williamson tellsRed Alert. “[The film] was in Warner Bros’s library so I toyed with turning it into a remake. Then I thought with a TV series, you could go further. Time After Time really only dealt with [the book] The Time Machine, and just one aspect of that novel. But what happened with Doctor Moreau, or War Of The Worlds that HG Wells was going to write? I thought, what a great stepping off point, to take Jack the Ripper, who is lost in modern New York City with Wells on his tail, and we can build the mythology from there. We can have a mash-up of Wells’s greatest hits.”

Thus the series will start with the basic premise of the film but dive into new areas of Wells’s life, writings, encounters and inspirations for his other books. “What I love about HG Wells is that he was trying to show the good and bad in humanity as it related to science and technology, and that’s very timely,” Williamson says. “The show is watching Wells (Freddie Stroma) stumble through a modernday world trying to find Jack the Ripper (Josh Bowman), who aligns himself with some evil people who know about the time machine. And HG finds one human – Jane Walker (Genesis Rodriguez) – who shows him kindness and he latches onto her. At its core, it’s a love story. There’s a lot of high stakes, danger, jeopardy, and a little death here and there, but that’s not the focus or what we’re meant to be.”