By Just over a year ago, Apple TV released and then fairly quickly cancelled the TV series adaptation of filmmaker Terry Gilliam’s acclaimed 1983 feature “Time Bandits”.
Jemaine Clement and his fellow “What We Do in the Shadows” creators Taika Waititi and Iain Morris created the series, which follows an 11-year-old history geek named Kevin (Kal-El Tuck) as he journeys through the centuries with a ragtag group of thieves.
Viewing figures for the series weren’t made publicly available, but the show didn’t break into Nielsen’s top 10 original streaming series during its run.
One issue the film faced is that the original was partly famous for its memorable cast of dwarf characters and actors – something the new one skipped altogether with this reimagining involving a crew of regularly sized individuals.
Speaking with La Repubblica (via World of Reel), Gilliam suggests that’s the main reason for the cancellation and says he wasn’t told about this “absurd” change until it was too late:
“They kept it from me for months that there were no dwarves in the series – something I consider structural to that story. When I found out, it was too late, and that’s why the series failed.
They brought me in as a non-writing executive producer, and I thought I had a bit of control, but when I read the scripts, I didn’t like them. Taika Waititi, the director whose ‘Jojo Rabbit’ I loved and to whom I thought I was handing the project, wasn’t really involved; his subsequent films were disappointing.”
Lisa Kudrow led the show’s cast of bandits who embarked on epic adventures through time and space while evil forces threatened life as we know it.
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