Wells pursues Jack the Ripper once more in ABC's 'Time After Time'

Television certainly has no shortage of time-travel shows this season, but one travels back to a well-received movie.

Director-screenwriter Nicholas Meyer adapted Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes' premise of novelist H.G. Wells pursuing the murderous Jack the Ripper from late-19th-century England to present-day America in “Time After Time,” a 1979 fantasy-drama that has retained a devoted following. Now developed for television by executive producer Kevin Williamson, the concept services an ABC series that has a two-hour premiere Sunday, March 5.

Freddie Stroma succeeds the film's Malcolm McDowell as Wells, who supposedly has built a time machine - as opposed just to writing about one - and uses it to pursue John Stevenson, alias “Jack” (Josh Bowman) to contemporary New York. Dangerously in the middle of their cat-and-mouse game is the very modern Jane (Genesis Rodriguez), who helps Wells while never far off John's radar. Will Chase also is in the regular cast.

“What we're doing, basically, is telling the story of a young H.G. Wells,” Williamson says. “While we're using the first episode as sort of the launching point, what happens ultimately is that we get into the other books of H.G. Wells.”

“One of the things I love about H.G. Wells,” adds Williamson, a professed fan of the 1979 movie, “is, thematically, the way that he often wrote of the good and bad in human nature and how it relates to technology. We live in a world where we are ruled by technology and our little gadgets in our hand, and that's how we live and breathe now, and it inspires the good and the bad in us. And Wells believed in utopia; he wanted that perfect society, and when he comes to modern-day New York, he's profoundly disappointed. And what does he do next? We see him stumble, whereas Jack the Ripper thrives.”

Stroma reflects that playing his part is “tricky, because a lot of what we know about Wells is when he was a little older. A lot of it is once he's had his success, so we were playing this pre- all of his novels, so I do think he would have been likable. I think there are other sides to him that I didn't bring into it, but from what Kevin wrote and from what was in the original film and book, he was this wide-eyed, bushy-tailed kind of guy who really believes in utopia, and that's what I latched onto.”

Though NBC's “Timeless” has put contemporary perspectives on issues of past eras, Williamson reasons that “Time After Time” is “meant to be an escape.”

“It's entertainment, so we do show the world through Wells' eyes and through John's eyes. Hopefully, you can jump on and follow it and live with the mythology as it grows and grows and grows, and it gets crazy and insane. I mean, it gets a little wacky. It's fun.”