• Say hello again to Ms. Tree! The Hollywood Reporter brings word that the protagonist, who appeared in a series of comic-book adventures during the 1980s and ’90s, and was created by author Max Allan Collins and artist Terry Beatty, will return to print in a collection now being readied by Titan Comics and Hard Case Crime. As the magazine explains, “The eponymous character—whose name is a pun on the word ‘mystery’—is a love letter to American crime fiction as well as a part of the genre; she was inspired by Velda, the assistant to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, and was often hinted to be the daughter of Dragnet’s Joe Friday. The high concept behind the character is that she’s a widow carrying on her dead husband’s private detective business, but is even more capable—and more deadly—than he ever was.” A listing at Amazon indicates that this Ms. Tree collection will be published in July.
• Knowing that British TV journalist Tom Bradby, whose career I have been following since the early 2000s—but who hasn’t published a new novel since Blood Money (2009)—finally has a fresh work, Secret Service, due out in the UK in May, I was pleased to find this piece in Shots. Penned by my old friend Ali Karim, it recalls a lunch he attended (sponsored by publisher Transworld), which honored both Bradby and another favorite fictionist of mine, Robert Goddard.
• Washington Post popular culture writer Travis M. Andrews asks, “What makes the third season of True Detective so successful?” His answer: Creator-writer Nic Pizzolatto “basically remade the first season.” To see how he makes that case, click here. FOLLOW-UP: Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall has more to say on this subject.
• Can proper use of the “Oxford comma” help your dating life?
• Back in 2017, I raved a bit about ABC-TV’s Time
After Time, a science-fiction crime thriller based on both Karl Alexander’s 1979 novel of that same name and on the Nicholas Meyer-scripted movie made from Alexander’s memorable cat-and-mouse adventure. If you recall, ABC’s mid-season replacement series found not-yet-novelist H.G. Wells (played by English actor Freddie Stroma) constructing a time machine in 1893 London, only to have it used by his longtime friend, surgeon John Stevenson (Josh Bowman), who Wells discovered—too late—was the homicidal Jack the Ripper … and who promptly escaped in said time-travel contraption. Wells gave chase, winding up, like Stevenson, in 21st-century New York City, where he encountered an enchanting young historian/assistant museum curator named Jane Walker (Genesis Rodriguez), willing to help him find and stop the Ripper before he extends his murderous rampage too much farther. Unfortunately, ABC showed just five episodes of Time After Time on Sunday nights before canceling the series, and I was led to believe that only a single further episode had been filmed but left unbroadcast. That last bit of information turns out to be have been wrong. In fact, there were 12 episodes made of this Kevin Williamson-developed series; and though ABC didn’t carry them all, other networks in South Africa, Australia, Spain, and elsewhere did. Now, thanks to a streaming service called CW Seed, those additional Time After Time eps have become available to American viewers. You can watch those you previously missed here. I’m still catching up with the program, hoping that the full Season 1 run left Williamson opportunity enough to tie up multiple mysteries left hanging at the end of Episode 5.
• Don’t be too quick to believe rumors that the title of the 25th James Bond film, currently scheduled for release in April 2020, will be Shatterhand. The Spy Command’s Bill Koenig has the story.
• Are we in the midst of a Cornell Woolrich revival?
• It’s been a while since I last picked up a Dick Francis novel, but Neil Nyren’s recent recap of his horse-racing and writing career, for CrimeReads, makes me want to go searching for all of those Francis thrillers I have not yet enjoyed.
• A month ago, organizers of Maryland’s annual Malice Domestic conference announced the finalists for the 2019 Agatha Awards in six categories, including Best Short Story. More recently, author-educator Art Taylor, a previous Agatha winner, has provided
links from his blog to places around the Web where you can find and read 2019’s Best Short Story contenders. Winners of the latest Agatha Awards are to be declared on May 4.
Showing posts with label Time After Time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Time After Time. Show all posts
Monday, February 25, 2019
Thursday, May 04, 2017
Not “Time” Enough
I’m very often late to the party when it comes to new TV shows, and that was certainly the case with the recent ABC midseason replacement series Time After Time, a Kevin Williamson-developed historical thriller based on both Karl Alexander’s novel of that same name and the 1979 Nicholas Meyer-scripted film made from Alexander’s fantastical cat-and-mouse adventure. It was just this week, in fact, that I finally caught up with the show, which imagines H.G. Wells—a freshly divorced teacher and journalist, not yet having published any of the science-fiction novels for which he would become famous—traveling in a time machine of his own invention from the London of 1893 to New York City in 2017, in pursuit of Jack the Ripper, who’s escaped justice using the same mechanism. Sadly, it’s now been more than a month since Time After Time was cancelled!
Expectations were that Season 1 of the show would comprise 12 episodes; eight of them had been scheduled by the time ABC pulled the plug, but only five were actually broadcast. The ratings for Time After Time were fairly dismal, and critics seemed unimpressed, with Variety’s Sonia Saraiya saying the program “feels neither adequately steeped in time travel or [sic] the lore of H.G. Wells to really deliver what its premise suggests.” My own view, however, after sitting through the opening five episodes, is that Time After Time boasted multiple charms—not the least being its young romantic leads, English actor Freddie Stroma (UnREAL) playing Wells, and the downright lovely Genesis Rodriguez as Texas-reared Jane Walker, who has moved to Gotham in search of a larger life, only to become an assistant curator at the (fictional) New York Metropolitan Museum. She meets Wells when he suddenly steps from his newly restored time
machine on display at the museum. Josh Bowman (Revenge) portrays John Stevenson, a London surgeon and Wells’ friend, who’s revealed as the notorious Ripper.
(Left) Freddie Stroma and Genesis Rodriguez in
Time After Time
Like the Malcolm McDowell/Mary Steenburgen film of 38 years ago, Williamson’s series makes much of Victorian gentleman Wells’ bewilderment around today’s technology and his initial discomfort in the company of a “modern woman.” He also has some fun with the Ripper, who is reimagined here as a sexy beast, intending to thrive in an age when the possibilities for violence seem so much greater than they did back in the 1890s. (Stevenson’s only disappointment, it seems, is that history has no idea it was he who perpetrated the Whitechapel slayings.) The series throws in additional secondary characters, among them a wealthy woman claiming to be Wells’ descendent and a willowy neural pathologist, Brooke Monroe (played by Jennifer Ferrin), who seduces, then captures Stevenson, intending to employ him in some sort of revenge scheme. Sadly, we never learn how Monroe knew he was the time-displaced Ripper. Like various other plot threads, this one was left dangling at the close of the fifth episode, probably never to be resolved. (We also never learn why the Ripper chose to lie low between 1888—the year his atrocities first hit the press—and 1893.) What we know of the direction this series might have taken comes from interviews with Williamson, such as one from TV Line, in which he called Time After Time “‘not really a time-travel show; we’re more the story of a young H.G. Wells and his adventures in modern-day New York, and how they inspire him to go back and write The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau’—by planting Easter eggs for those novels, as well as War of the Worlds, throughout the first, 12-episode season.”
For at least the time being, you can still watch what exists of Time After Time by going to the ABC-TV Web site. There’s also a Facebook page devoted to the show, which includes clips from different episodes. You can click here to take in the series’ official trailer, and as a bonus, click here to see the trailer from the 1979 film adaptation of Alexander’s book. I hope it’s possible someday to catch up with the final three, un-broadcast episodes of Time After Time, whether on YouTube or with a DVD release. The show held promise, unlike so many U.S. network programs nowadays.
Expectations were that Season 1 of the show would comprise 12 episodes; eight of them had been scheduled by the time ABC pulled the plug, but only five were actually broadcast. The ratings for Time After Time were fairly dismal, and critics seemed unimpressed, with Variety’s Sonia Saraiya saying the program “feels neither adequately steeped in time travel or [sic] the lore of H.G. Wells to really deliver what its premise suggests.” My own view, however, after sitting through the opening five episodes, is that Time After Time boasted multiple charms—not the least being its young romantic leads, English actor Freddie Stroma (UnREAL) playing Wells, and the downright lovely Genesis Rodriguez as Texas-reared Jane Walker, who has moved to Gotham in search of a larger life, only to become an assistant curator at the (fictional) New York Metropolitan Museum. She meets Wells when he suddenly steps from his newly restored time
machine on display at the museum. Josh Bowman (Revenge) portrays John Stevenson, a London surgeon and Wells’ friend, who’s revealed as the notorious Ripper.(Left) Freddie Stroma and Genesis Rodriguez in
Time After Time
Like the Malcolm McDowell/Mary Steenburgen film of 38 years ago, Williamson’s series makes much of Victorian gentleman Wells’ bewilderment around today’s technology and his initial discomfort in the company of a “modern woman.” He also has some fun with the Ripper, who is reimagined here as a sexy beast, intending to thrive in an age when the possibilities for violence seem so much greater than they did back in the 1890s. (Stevenson’s only disappointment, it seems, is that history has no idea it was he who perpetrated the Whitechapel slayings.) The series throws in additional secondary characters, among them a wealthy woman claiming to be Wells’ descendent and a willowy neural pathologist, Brooke Monroe (played by Jennifer Ferrin), who seduces, then captures Stevenson, intending to employ him in some sort of revenge scheme. Sadly, we never learn how Monroe knew he was the time-displaced Ripper. Like various other plot threads, this one was left dangling at the close of the fifth episode, probably never to be resolved. (We also never learn why the Ripper chose to lie low between 1888—the year his atrocities first hit the press—and 1893.) What we know of the direction this series might have taken comes from interviews with Williamson, such as one from TV Line, in which he called Time After Time “‘not really a time-travel show; we’re more the story of a young H.G. Wells and his adventures in modern-day New York, and how they inspire him to go back and write The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau’—by planting Easter eggs for those novels, as well as War of the Worlds, throughout the first, 12-episode season.”
For at least the time being, you can still watch what exists of Time After Time by going to the ABC-TV Web site. There’s also a Facebook page devoted to the show, which includes clips from different episodes. You can click here to take in the series’ official trailer, and as a bonus, click here to see the trailer from the 1979 film adaptation of Alexander’s book. I hope it’s possible someday to catch up with the final three, un-broadcast episodes of Time After Time, whether on YouTube or with a DVD release. The show held promise, unlike so many U.S. network programs nowadays.
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