There are three things wrong with The Time Traveler’s Wife (Monday 16 May, 9pm, Sky Atlantic), the HBO miniseries of the 2003 book that already spawned a 2009 film (I am past caring about remakes, before you start; I live in a post-caring about remakes world). The first is the music, which seems more befitting of a 90s adventure movie where a boy moves house but forgets his beloved dog. A minor quibble, but you won’t be able to un-hear it once you notice it, too. The second and third problems are the same issue in different forms: The Time Traveler’s Wife miniseries is affected by two of the dominant trends in TV and film-making over the last 15 years – to-camera mockumentary confessionals, and the smart-alec dialogue of Marvel movies. Put it like this: if I went back in time and made it so that Iron Man and Rashida Jones’s entire TV career never happened, The Time Traveler’s Wife would be a completely different show. A much, much better show.
I’ll get the Marvel stuff out of the way so fans who set up Google Alerts about the movies can quickly skip to berating me on Twitter: I like Marvel movies, I think it’s impressive that they have re-invented the “supporting movie franchises like a football team” thing they cribbed from Star Wars, and it’s equally impressive that all those dozens of movies and shows later there is still a cohesive through-line to the whole thing. That said, Marvel’s signature “Yeah ... that just happened”, hollow-centred snappy banter has personally started to grate, so to see it show up in The Time Traveler’s Wife is particularly jarring. In Marvel movies, those affectedly light moments are so good at punctuating the earnestness of superheroes declaring undying love in the midst of an alien war; in a TV production that is essentially a romantic drama with a pesky sci-fi element getting in the way, it gets annoying fast. Rose Leslie’s Clare and Theo James’s Henry are both very good, but sometimes they talk to each other like they’re two Funko Pops trying to birth a new catchphrase.
