The Time Traveler’s Wife is no ordinary TV series. It’s bonkers

As a plot device, time travel traditionally allows for any number of storytelling gambits: the paradox of altering the past to affect the present, notions of cruel, unyielding fate, and the temporal team-up of twin iterations of the same person. But thanks to HBO’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, these concepts are redundant. The limited series leaps forward to ask a deeper, more pressing question – would you travel back in time to have sex with yourself?

That’s what Henry DeTamble (Theo James) does in the show’s second episode, though it’s a short journey. As a 16-year-old, this timeline wanderer zips back a few months or less to orally pleasure his slightly younger 16-year-old self. We know this because there’s a very twisted American Pie moment when Henry’s bewildered father catches him (them?) in bed, which is seen as part of Henry blithely explaining his teenage self-fellatio to Clare Abshire (Rose Leslie), who is his slightly dismayed soulmate.

“C’mon, I was 16,” Henry dismissively notes although, because there was two of him, he was technically aged 32. And in the context of The Time Traveler’s Wife, a show that is cheerfully bonkers, that’s just par for the course. Airing on Foxtel and Binge, this is no ordinary series. It is absolutely stuffed with baffling gambits and laugh-out-loud missteps. It is bad in the very special way of being so committed to its wild eccentricities that it passes for acceptable. It is weirdly watchable; so off the rails that you can no longer see the tracks.

The source material is the 2003 novel by American writer Audrey Niffenegger, which ties grand romantic drama to a science-fiction framework. The 2009 Hollywood movie adaptation – which wisely skipped any self-help sex sequences – starred Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, but it is too tastefully tragic for this demented story. It tried to tame the material instead of unleashing it, but the show’s creator, Doctor Who and Sherlock showrunner Steven Moffat, has no such issue.

Seriously, this is once-in-a-decade bananas television.

“I married a time traveller. It’s complicated,” Clare says in the narrative’s framing device – separate interviews to camera by Henry and her. She shrugs her shoulders; the tone is droll. Because the early episodes are shot through with bloody portents of Henry’s eventual demise, which trail him through time so he and the audience witness them, the counterpoint is some romantic comedy banter. When-Harry-Repeatedly-Met-Sally predicaments have giddy explanations, but tragedies are deployed like salt to a wound.

Henry can’t control his time travelling. Without warning, he will arrive naked in another part of his life, falling a short distance, throwing up and struggling to survive until he blips back to the time he left. Henry often beats up the nearest man to get some clothes. Moments of emotional torment or wonder repeatedly attract him – there’s a sequence built around the ludicrously gory death of Henry’s mother where a dozen Henrys of different ages watch as his eight-year-old self gets drenched in maternal blood. It’s tragedy amped up to absurdism.

But the place Henry goes most is Clare’s childhood. 152 times to be exact. He tells her the dates in advance, when he’s 36 and she’s just six, so she can have some clothes and food waiting for him. Versions of Henry in his 30s and 40s return for the next 10 years, during which he, well, grooms her. Clare grows up with Henry as her ideal man, realising that in the future she will marry him. It is not subtle. “Haven’t I grown?” she announces, removing her dress at age 20 when she finally beds 28-year-old Henry.