“Time Bandits,” which premiered Wednesday on Apple TV+, adopts the premise and particulars of Terry Gilliam’s wonderful 1981 comic fantasy adventure and stretches it, without breaking, into a television series. Created by Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi and Iain Morris, it’s likable, lively, funny and fun.
Still, it’s best to put Gilliam’s film out of your mind, or at least not to mind the differences. There are some direct borrowings and a similar sort of humor, but where the movie is unsentimental, violent and grotesque — in a good way, I mean — the series is sentimental, not so violent and grotesque only when it comes to actual monsters. Most notably, the bandits, who were played by little people in the movie, led by the great David Rappaport and including Kenny Baker, the man inside R2-D2, are full-sized actors here. (There are little people in other roles, who appear to be set for a second-season plotline.)
As before, the central character is a small English boy named Kevin (Kal-El Tuck), whose room, unbeknownst to him, happens to be a portal through time and space. (Both Kevin and his room, the series suggests, are significant in a special way.) Kevin is an exuberant nerd whose impulsive lectures on history his parents, glued to their screens, find boring; his sister, Saffron (Kiera Thompson), a new character, regards him as ridiculous, pathetic and a little repulsive, as siblings can. She’ll play a large role in later episodes.
One night, a wardrobe in Kevin’s room begins to shake and emanate light, and when he opens the door, he finds himself on a faraway beach, in a faraway time, where a Viking is being chased by Saxons — nothing as dramatic as the knight on horseback that bursts into his bedroom in the film, but sufficiently alarming. Nevertheless, Kevin takes the opportunity to ask the hunted man “why the Vikings suddenly stopped their murderous ways and adopted agrarianism.”