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On paper, Apple TV+ was onto a winner with Time Bandits: a genre-based comedy series from the original What We Do In The Shadows team of Jermaine Clement and Taika Waititi, with a cast that included both Clement and Waititi, as well as Friends’ Lisa Kudrow, Black Sails’ Tadhg Murphy, Sherlock’s Mark Gatiss, and Waititi’s Our Flag Means Death co-star (and the internet’s latest chosen Daddy), Con O’Neill. Surely, surely this was a show that was built to set social media aflame with memes! Surely, this was a show that was destined for success, especially given online fandom decrying Max’s cancellation of Our Flag Means Death and the subsequent mobilization of attempting to prove that there’s an audience out there for such material. After all, what better way to demonstrate the strength of the audience for a Taika Waititi-produced, Waititi-starring genre comedy on a streaming service than to… well, watch one?

Anyway, Time Bandits has been canceled by Apple after one season.

So, what happened? How did it all go wrong? I have some theories.

No-One Knew About The Time Bandits series

One of the primary responses I’ve seen online to news of the show’s cancellation has been, “Wait, there was a Time Bandits show? When did that happen?” It’s safe to say that Apple didn’t do the best job of promoting the series — to the point where there wasn’t even a trailer released for the series until a little over two weeks before the series’ debut on the streaming service. It was a remarkably low key launch for a series that had been in the works for more than five years by that point (work began on the series way back in 2018), seemingly inexplicably… until you remember that the series had become controversial months ahead of launch, with Charlyne Yi alleging that they had been “physically assaulted multiple times” by another actor on set, leading to their removal from the project. (Yi has extensively posted about the topic on their Instagram.)

It’s possible that, given Yi’s complaints and the lack of true response from their fellow cast, crew, or producers — beyond a blanket statement from Paramount TV Studios at the time saying that it had “conducted a full investigation regarding allegations” and that “we cannot comment on specifics [but] additional steps were taken to address concerns” — Apple simply felt like the show had become too much of a hot potato to put any true promotional weight behind it. Whatever the reason, a lot of people didn’t seem to know that Time Bandits had even happened… which makes it particularly difficult to find an audience, never mind one that would prove themselves devoted enough to try to save it.

Time Bandits Was A Remake

This may or may not be an issue, but I find myself wondering if the fact that Time Bandits was a remake of a cult movie from the 1980s played against the show’s potential fanbase. While I’m unsure that the original Time Bandits — directed and co-written by Terry Gilliam, and released back in 1981 — has a massive (or even truly active) fanbase, the fact that it was being rebooted at all (and without the involvement of anyone from the original project, for that matter) feels as if it could have scared away some potential viewers, either from the point of view of “I didn’t watch the original, maybe that means I won’t understand the new version,” or the “why can’t they come up with new ideas, anyway?” crowd.

Never mind that both Clement and Waititi have talked before about the fact that the original Time Bandits is a favorite film for them, or that Time Bandits as a concept is malleable enough to be remade numerous times without losing its core… the fact that the project was a remake might have been enough for an interested audience to walk away, feeling that they’d seen it all before.

The Show Was More Expensive Than It Needed To Be To Survive

One of the arguments made by Max when Our Flag Means Death was cancelled was, simply, that not enough people were watching to make the show financially worthwhile for the streamer. It’s very possible that the same thing was the case for Time Bandits, which was similarly not a cheap production — much of the series was shot on location in New Zealand, and featured both an international cast and no shortage of special effects — and, therefore, a series that would have required a significant viewership to earn its budget back. Something like Time Bandits is a financial risk for those responsible, and requires either a dedication from the network/studio/platform to stick with it until it finds its audience, or a certain amount of luck to find a sizable audience almost immediately to make it worthwhile on a purely fiscal level.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from the fate of Time Bandits — and, arguably, Our Flag Means Death before it, which shares no small amount of DNA with this show — it could be, simply, to start smaller and see how successful a project is at that level before scaling up… and, in the process, demonstrating to platforms and distributors that there is an audience out there for independent genre projects with a diverse cast. Theatrically, that approach seems to be paying off with medium-budget movies like Alien: Romulus and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finding success… so perhaps it’s the next step for streaming television, too. (I’m tempted to point to Apple TV+'s renewal of the significantly cheaper The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin as proof of this, honestly.) We can but hope.

Whatever the reason the show was cancelled, Time Bandits remains streaming on Apple TV+ for now. Perhaps curious fans should check it out — and maybe prove to Apple that there’s more of an audience out there for this kind of thing than initially seemed to be the case.

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