Former Doctor Who Showrunner Steven Moffat To Adapt The Time Traveller’s Wife For HBO
by Erik Amaya
Ex-Doctor Who boss Steven Moffat hasn’t had his fill of time travel.
According to Variety, Moffat will adapt Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife for HBO. First released in 2003, the novel centers on Clare, a woman who falls in love with a man unstuck in time thanks a genetic condition. He appears to her throughout her lifetime, but often in the wrong order. It is a premise Moffat would use himself in the 2005 episode “The Girl in the Fireplace.” He would use it again the two-part Doctor Who episode “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead” and throughout his time as the program’s showrunner via the ongoing relationship between the Doctor (David Tennant, Matt Smith, and Peter Capaldi) and Professor River Song (Alex Kingston), a human/Time Lord hybrid who may or may not have been his wife. But as both had varying time travel abilities, the Doctor first meets Professor Song on the last day of her life.
Because if there is one thing Moffat loves, it’s timey-wimey romance.
In a statement, Moffat admitted to pilfering the novel’s premise for “The Girl in the Fireplace” and said, “When, in her next novel, Audrey had a character watching that very episode, I realised she was probably on to me. All these years later, the chance to adapt the novel itself, is a dream come true. The brave new world of long form television is now ready for this kind of depth and complexity. It’s a story of happy ever after — but not necessarily in that order.”
The novel was previously adapted as a 2009 feature film with Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana.
