By Mike Hale
When the bandits of the title burst into the bedroom of Kevin, an 11-year-old history buff, in the new Apple TV+ series “Time Bandits,” among the first things you are likely to notice is: no dwarfs.
The show’s source, Terry Gilliam’s 1981 movie of the same title, was all about the dwarfs. There were six of them, who pilfered a map that identifies time portals and used it to try to steal whatever historical loot they could get their hands on. Along the way, they picked up Kevin, who came to serve as both the brains and the conscience of the operation.
The bandits in Jemaine Clement, Iain Morris and Taika Waititi’s “Time Bandits,” which premieres Wednesday with two of its 10 episodes, are a fully heighted bunch; their more-or-less leader, Penelope, is played by Lisa Kudrow, who towered over her female co-stars on “Friends.”
Changing things up after 43 years is unremarkable, and perhaps the film’s less than nuanced presentation of the dwarf characters as a rollicking, bickering, slapstick bunch marked by physical abandon and short tempers gave the TV show’s creators pause. (On the other hand, the change in those central roles has been criticized as anti-inclusive by advocates for little people, including descendants of the actors who played the original bandits.)
Among the next things you notice about this new “Time Bandits,” though, is that nothing has replaced the energy that Jack Purvis, Kenny Baker and the other actors with dwarfism brought to the film. And while Clement, Morris and Waititi share some of the anarchic sensibility of Gilliam and his co-writer, Michael Palin, they present it here in a domesticated, flattened-out form.
As it follows the peripatetic adventures of the bandits — from visits to the Maya empire and plague-ravaged medieval Europe to battles with dinosaurs and demons to confrontations with Pure Evil and the Supreme Being, the Mutt-and-Jeff deities of the “Time Bandits” universe — the show is unfailingly clever, visually interesting and at least mildly amusing. It is wan, though, compared to other series that Clement, Morris and Waititi have collaborated on, like “Flight of the Conchords” and the riotous “What We Do in the Shadows.”
The bandits, in addition to being taller, are now a more timorous, less successful bunch, with individual sets of neuroses that constitute their characters. Penelope’s insecurity about her leadership qualities turns her into an order-barking harpy — it’s a dull role, and Kudrow doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen her do before. Alto (Tadhg Murphy) is a frustrated actor; Bittelig (Rune Temte) is an overly gentle giant; Widgit (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva), the keeper of the map, can’t figure out how to use it. (The band becomes particularly male-heavy in the second half of the season, when Charlyne Yi, who plays the empath Judy, drops out of the action; Yi, who uses they-them pronouns, left the production after making public statements that they were abused on the set.)
The initial dynamic driving the story — the bandit crew’s desire for loot running counter to Kevin’s enthusiasm for historical discovery, not to mention his basic decency — is the same as the movie’s, and Kal-El Tuck gives an engaging performance as the exhaustingly nerdy Kevin. And as with the Monty Python-style original, the continual time-and-place jumps lead to an episodic, sketch-like format in which the originality of the set pieces varies but some inevitably pop.
Mark Gatiss is lethally supercilious as the Earl of Sandwich, insisting on his status as the inventor of meat between slices of bread; Con O’Neil of “Our Flag Means Death” shows off his mastery of comic bluster as the sheriff of Nottingham. Clement is a worthy successor to David Warner as Pure Evil, gagging elaborately each time he tries to say “Supreme Being”; in an expanded role as said being, though, Waititi accomplishes less than Ralph Richardson did in a few minutes in the film.
The 10 episodes are filled out with new subplots. One, involving Kevin’s sister, Saffron (Kiera Thompson), the meanest and most dismissive but also the spunkiest of siblings, is the best thing about the show; another, involving his and Saffron’s parents, demonstrates that cleverness does not close the door on crowd-pleasing sentimentality.
Seen from 2024, one of the most distinctive things about Gilliam’s film is its dystopian flavor, and the casual brutality of its humor and of its attitude toward its characters, particularly Kevin’s parents. The series is softer, a quality that emerges fully in its treatment of the bond that grows between Kevin and Penelope. It could use a little more cruelty, and some of the boisterousness that the dwarfs brought to the film. Speaking of which, keep your eyes open: You never know who might pop up.
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