No marriage is perfect, but when your spouse keeps disappearing for weeks, only to return naked and vomiting, it may be a sign that you need outside help — or a divorce. Yet what Henry and Clare DeTamble need isn’t a counsellor, or even a solicitor. It’s a theoretical physicist.
The Time Traveler’s Wife, airing on Sky Atlantic, is a new serialised adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s best-selling sci-fi-cum-romance novel. Produced by HBO and developed by Steven Moffat (no stranger to the genre from his time as Doctor Who showrunner), it seeks to make amends for the little-loved, mawkish film version of 2009.
Although the schmaltz has by no means been purged entirely — an opening sequence finds Henry and Clare musing about love and their unusual relationship in When Harry Met Sally-style interviews — the six-episode structure is clearly better suited to containing such a knotty, trippy narrative.
Time travel for Henry (Theo James) is “not a superpower, [but] a disability”. It sees him repeatedly, uncontrollably and temporarily slip out of his linear chronology, leaving only a pile of clothes behind. The gross inconvenience is tempered by the fact that these flights through time tend to be short haul, rarely taking him outside his native Chicago or beyond his lifespan.
Often he finds himself relocated to a garden where he discovers six-year-old Clare (Everleigh McDonell), who will eventually become his wife (Rose Leslie). In what could well be considered an act of grooming, thirtysomething Henry tells the child her fate. And so she grows up waiting and readying herself for when their lives will intersect as adults. When it arrives, she encounters a younger, shaggy-haired Henry who is oblivious to his future self’s involvement in Clare’s past. “I’m going to marry you,” she explains to him. Quite intense for a first date.
The central gimmick is unavoidably clunky, and it only gets more headache-inducing once it’s established that multiple Henrys of different ages coexist in the same timeline. But the show is buoyed by the charisma of the two lovers, and it succeeds in mining its conceit for some gentle humour and reflections on love and loss. When it’s not too busy trying to explain itself that is.
★★★☆☆
On Sky Atlantic from May 16 at 9pm and on HBO from May 15
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