Most of us want to love goofy time travel stories. From Doctor Who to Bill & Ted, to Back to the Future, and yes, the Terry Gilliam cult-classic Time Bandits, the potential in these set-ups is somewhat obvious. Every great adventure often has a fish-out-of-water hero, and most successful humor relies on juxtaposition and contradictions. With time travel stories, you have both built-in: the time traveler characters are almost always fishes-out-of-water, and anachronisms are often hilarious.
However, with Apple TV+’s new series Time Bandits, these ingredients alone aren’t enough to make the series into something greater than the sum of its stitched-together parts. While it's natural to want to like Time Bandits while watching it, it’s also the kind of series that is neither funny enough nor complex enough to warrant having this many episodes. Rebooting Time Bandits with Jemaine Clement, Iain Morris, and Taika Waititi at the helm is a good idea. However, did this need to be a full TV series, with this many episodes? Like many well-intentioned TV shows from the past few years, Time Bandits suffers from a major flaw — this simply should have been a movie.
Like the 1981 Gilliam movie of the same name, Time Bandits focuses on a young boy named Kevin who is obsessed with historical facts and accidentally finds himself traveling through time with a group of off-kilter wannabe thieves. And, like the 1981 movie, the tone of Time Bandits is decidedly family-friendly, meaning we’re dealing with clean humor and a relatively wholesome approach to journeys to famous historical points in history. However, whereas some family-oriented series — like the Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017-2019), or the Disney+ version of The Mysterious Benedict Society (2021-2022) — contain endless amounts of real wit, combined with hyperbolic, fantastical action, Time Bandits simply isn’t funny or fun enough to warrant this many episodes.
The show lacks tension, realism, or a sense of believable stakes, all of which could be hand-waved away with the defense that “It's a kids' show, it’s not supposed to have any of those things.” But, again, the ridiculously funny, and brilliantly emotional A Series of Unfortunate Events proves that’s not remotely true. Not to mention that the longest-running time travel series of all time, Doctor Who, began as a family-friendly series that could help teach kids about history. So, if anyone thinks we shouldn’t be hard on Time Bandits because it’s “just a kids show,” that’s both not fair to kids (don’t they deserve good shows?) and also not true of other transcendent kids’ series.
Based on the trailer, what many fans of Taika Waititi probably hoped for out of Time Bandits was an all-ages version of Our Flag Means Death, or the greatest show in modern history, What We Do in the Shadows. But instead of being dynamic, creative, and fun, Time Bandits is mostly repetitive and slow. The “kids' show” defense ceases to work when something is this long and boring.
I have a 7-year-old who will sit and listen to me read her chapters from The Fellowship of the Ring. I can’t imagine her getting through the plodding first Time Bandits episode, and that’s partly because the show repeats the same idea over and over again: Kevin’s parents are out-of-touch and addicted to looking at their phones. Kevin loves random historical facts and is a loner kid, so much so that he plays board games by himself. But unlike, say, a Harry Potter living under the stairs or the Baudelaire orphans, we never really get the sense that Kevin is damaged or truly saddened by the relentless othering the writing has foisted upon him. Little of this changes by episode 10.
None of this is the fault of the cast. Kal-El Tuck as Kevin is charming, and nails all of his scenes, never falling into the category of a child actor who can’t carry the show. He’s genuinely great and does what he can with material that renders his character fairly one-note. Lisa Kudrow is reliably smirk-inducing as Penelope, the crackpot leader of the titular bandits, who, like her young co-star, manages to imbue the basic premise with heart and warmth. In fact, during the first two episodes, any rational person will wonder why these great actors — Charlyne Yi, Rune Temte, Tadhg Murphy, and Roger Jean Nsengiyumva, and of course Waititi and Clement in supporting roles — weren’t all just asked to do a movie version of this same premise. These performers all work exceeding well as an ensemble, even if they are all trapped in sitcom-character loops for 10 episodes. I’d love to say that by the end of the show, these characters feel different, but the truth is, they don’t. You can easily watch the first episode and then skip to the last episode, and be only mildly confused.
Time Bandits feels like what could have happened to the Chris Pine-led Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, had it been transformed into a 10-part TV series. Instantly, you can imagine the problem. All the charm of a vaguely generic fantasy-quest plot and fairly thin characters can overstay its warm welcome simply because it’s too long. Sadly, Time Bandits isn’t clever enough to vary its tone enough to make it like a soft PG Stranger Things. This means it's more firmly in the category of the movie its loosely based upon. Had Gilliam’s Time Bandits been turned into a TV series in 1981, it would have been a disaster. While the new Time Bandits isn’t a complete mess, it’s oddly something a little sadder. What could have been a charming remake of a fantasy film has instead become a slow-ish TV series you probably won’t finish.
