Review: The Time Traveler's Wife, Season 1 at Strange Horizons

One thing that has happened as I've gotten older and more experienced as a critic is that I tend to write fewer outright pans. Life is too short to spend consuming things that you hate, much less expending the mental energy to explain and illustrate why they should be hated. But every now and then, a work comes along that hits just the right sweet spot, so terrible that there are only bad things to say about it, but in a way that makes it impossible to look away, and which compels you to share your dismay with everyone else. HBO Max's The Time Traveler's Wife, based on the bestselling novel by Audrey Niffenegger and adapted by TV wunderkind Steven Moffat, is such a work. Over at Strange Horizons, I try to summarize the many ways in which this show fails. More importantly, I try to figure out whether the root of the show's badness lies in the original novel—whose problems have been amply elaborated upon over the last twenty years—or in the no less problematic showrunner.

The true pleasure of watching The Time Traveler's Wife lies in trying to puzzle out who is more responsible for the atrocity playing out on screen, Moffat or Niffenegger. The author, it must be said, bears a lion's share of the blame. It's been a while since I read the novel, so quite often while watching I would find myself staring slack-jawed at the screen before remembering that, yes, this is an accurate representation of events in a book that squatted for weeks in the upper tiers of the New York Times bestseller list. Take, for example, the fact that Clare's best friend Charisse (Natasha Lopez) is dating, and will eventually marry, a man named Gomez (Desmin Borges), who is in love with Clare—which everyone in the foursome, including Charisse herself, is fully aware of. [2] Or that the only person in the series to point out how depraved Henry and Clare’s situation is—Henry's ex-girlfriend Ingrid (Chelsea Frei)—almost immediately finds herself rewarded with a prophecy of her own imminent, self-inflicted death.
This is also a great opportunity to remind you all that Strange Horizons's annual fund drive still has a few days left to run. Though the drive has already met its goal, it is now aiming at stretch goals that will pay for special issues on Caribbean SFF, Wuxia, and childbearing. Though I appreciate Strange Horizons giving me a platform from which I can spew bile at deserving targets like The Time Traveler's Wife, its true value is as a site for groundbreaking SFF fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. If you're able to, please consider contributing to help them continue in their mission.

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