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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
7
Mixed:
8
Negative:
11
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Critic Reviews
May 29, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The idea of different chronological variants of the same character wandering the same timeline would be a forbidden paradox in most time-travel tales. But The Time Traveler's Wife embraces it. Because highly emotional moments in his life act as a kind of magnet for Henry's temporal tumbles, there are certain moments—the awful ones, mostly, like the death of his mother—where there are as many as 20 versions of him looking on, all as dumbstruck with horror as they were the first time they witnessed it.
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May 12, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Sometimes these efforts are awkward. Sometimes these efforts are outright corny. But occasionally—and especially when Moffat and Nutter are willing to take their hands off the throttle and let the show live in the weird emotional intricacies of the relationship it’s supposed to be about—James and especially Leslie manage to make you understand why Henry and Claire’s love is so compelling.
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May 12, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Stars Rose Leslie and Theo James have an easygoing bicker-banter chemistry that lets this fantasy rom-com slide past its many ridiculous and overtly sentimental moments. No, it’s not a show for the ages, but it works as a ray of empty-headed spring-summer sunny optimism.
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The GuardianMay 17, 2022
Season 1 Review:
[Steven Moffat] takes the melodrama down a notch and salts the schmaltz with wit where he can. ... But it has two intrinsic problems to overcome – and hurdles one more successfully than the other. The first is the ick factor occasioned by Henry’s many visits as a grown man to Clare as a child. ... The other problem is more deep-rooted. Niffenegger’s story is built around Clare’s passivity. Her life, while not static or unfulfilled professionally, is defined by waiting for Henry.
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Radio TimesMay 11, 2022
The TelegraphMay 17, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It plays out like a passable Channel 5 daytime film, not a supposedly prestige series from HBO. The adaptation is so lazy that episodes begin with the lead characters reading lines straight into the camera, rather than anyone making the effort to work them into the script.
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May 11, 2022
Season 1 Review:
James’ performance leans into Henry’s weariness, seeming at times petulant at what he’s being made to endure. Leslie, a warm and appealing presence on “Game of Thrones,” fares well by contrast, and excels particularly at carrying across some of the more florid lines of dialogue that remind viewers of this project’s literary origins. But the story fails to convince that the couple shares much more than an understanding of the obstacles keeping them apart. So much time is spent on establishing the rules of this show’s game that there’s little room to play.
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May 13, 2022
Season 1 Review:
[Theo James] plays Henry as snarky, shallow, wisecracking and flippant far too often. Rose Leslie (“The Good Fight”) is the grounded center of the series as Clare. But, as the episodes drag on, we keep waiting for her to realize that all she ever talks about with Henry is his situation.
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May 16, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Theo James and Rose Leslie are] done no favors by a narrative that never seems to have wondered who Clare, especially, is beyond a time traveler’s wife — nor by their inability to generate any real sparks between them, much less any brilliant enough to serve as a beacon through space and time. ... The Time Traveler’s Wife fails so direly to mine any romance from its central premise that it starts to build a case for the opposite.
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May 16, 2022
Season 1 Review:
This is still a grown man interacting with the woman he'll eventually be sleeping with while she is a child playing with a toy horse. He's weirded out by it, and rightly so; therefore, so are we. Somehow there must be a means of pulling off these scenes in ways that don't make a person's skin crawl, but Moffat has not cracked that nut. ... Whether the main flaw in "The Time Traveler's Wife" is in the flatness of the prose or the emotional disconnect in the delivery is hard to say, but together they conspire to transform Clare into little more than a construct waiting to be animated.
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May 11, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The show lacks momentum, partially because its neglect to establish a fixed, forward-moving “present” creates the sense of drifting unmoored through the decades. If you put aside the grooming issue, there’s just not much that’s distinctive about the characters. ... In the absence of even that kernel of enjoyment, all The Time Traveler’s Wife has to offer is an extended, painfully literal allegory for the bromide that true love transcends time.
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May 13, 2022RogerEbert.comMay 13, 2022
Season 1 Review:
[Theo James'] wooden performance would be more interesting if he were actually a tree. No, the real star of this woeful, pointless television programme is its toxic gender and sexual politics. ... No matter the timeline the writing, acting, directing, editing, and music range from mediocre to horrible.
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