Terry Gilliam's "Time Bandits" is an odd choice to turn into a television series. It's a child's fantasy adventure story told with the humor and irreverence of the creators of "Monty Python," but with a darker subversive edge that you don't see in mainstream media much. I guess if anybody was going to come close to capturing that same feeling, it would be Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, who created the "Time Bandits" series with Iain Morris.
So, a nerdy kid named Kevin (Kal-El Tuck), who is obsessed with history, discovers that his bedroom is a portal to different time periods. He meets the Time Bandits, including leader Penelope (Lisa Kudrow), Judy (Charlyne Yi), Bittelig (Rune Temte), Alto (Tadhg Murphy), and Widgit (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva), who are former employees of the Supreme Being (Waititi). They've stolen a map to all the portals that allow travel through space and time, in order to get rich. However, they're idiots, and Kevin ends up being more knowledgeable than all of them. He's accidentally pulled into the band's schemes, and helps them through all kinds of trouble as they travel from the Mayan Empire to the sacking of Troy to Prohibition era Chicago. The Supreme Being is chasing them, because he wants his map back, and so is Pure Evil (Clement) and his henchwoman Fianna (Rachel House), who get Kevin's parents (James Dryden, Felicity Ward), and younger sister Saffron (Kiera Thompson) into the adventure too.
I've seen the movie a few times, and I'm honestly not much of a fan, so I feel I'm in a pretty good position to parse the series in nostalgia-free terms. What the Waititi and company have elected to do is to retell the plot of the "Time Bandits" movie, with much more conventional plotting and character building over longer journeys to different parts of history, but still retain a lot of the original concepts and imagery. The humor is still plenty eccentric, but has almost no edge. For instance, the original band of time-traveling thieves was made up of dwarf actors. These have been replaced with a group of oddball comedy actors of taller stature - the kind that show up in most Waititi projects these days. There are still a couple of dwarf actors in the show, but they're very peripheral. The various encounters with historical figures still lean into absurdity, but are generally much sillier and nobody ever seems to be in any danger that the bandits can't talk their way out of.
It takes a couple of episodes for the humor to gel, and in the absence of a stronger lead like Rhys Ifans in the similar "Our Flag Means Death," the rest of the cast often feels adrift. Lisa Kudrow is great, but has more supporting character energy than lead. The kids are great, but don't quite have the necessary presence to keep the momentum going. When the chemistry is just right, like when the bandits meet a pompous Earl of Sandwich played by Mark Gatiss, the show can be a lot of fun. However, this doesn't happen as often as I was hoping. Where I think the series has a leg up is that it's got a lot of heart to it, which the movie was totally lacking. Over the course of the series, I got attached to Kevin and the Time Bandits. His TV obsessed parents have no idea how to relate to him, but this doesn't mean they're irredeemable, or that Kevin doesn't love them.
The scope of the production is impressive. This was clearly a pretty big budget affair, with excellent effects work, a lot of it practical to match the feel of the movie. I'm very fond of Mark Mothersbaugh's electronica theme music. The time periods and historical figures visited by the bandits are much more diverse than what we got in the movie, and we get to spend more time in each new environment since there are ten episodes to fill. Regretfully, the early installments are awfully repetitive, with everyone quickly falling into a formula of failed heists and Kevin incrementally becoming more confident. It takes too long for the bigger stakes of the story to be established, resulting in the last few episodes feeling very rushed.
And to top it all off, the ending of the season is a mess. It's not just a cliffhanger, but leaves off at a point where I was pretty sure that an episode or two just got cut from the series order at the last moment. A second season doesn't look likely at the moment, and I'd be far more willing to recommend the show if it were more self-contained. On the other hand, an abrupt exit is in line with how the Gilliam movie ended, so I guess I can't really complain.
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