Plodding Pace, Predictable Plot Encumber Trip Through ‘Time’

Ready for another trip through time?

What has surely become one of the most used and abused story premises in television drama crops up again on Showtime’s “Time at the Top.” But don’t expect any wild effects or weird creatures. Since this is an original film made for Showtime’s “Original Pictures for All Ages” franchise, it is thoroughly G-rated, its time-traveling passages appropriately handled for a family viewing audience.

So, too, for the script, which is derived from a novel by Edward Ormondroyd. The story takes place in Philadelphia, where 13-year-old Susan Shawson is trying to work out her relationship with her father Frank (Timothy Busfield) after the recent death of her mother. Although they reside in an apartment that is an interior decorator’s dream, within an utterly benign apartment building filled with pleasantly eccentric characters, Susan (portrayed skillfully by Elisha Cuthbert) is not a happy camper.

Much of her time is spent reading newspapers for Ed, a blind and lonely neighbor, an association that leads Susan to the inadvertent discovery that the elevator in the building has the power to take her back through time. Taking the journey, she touches down in several different eras, but it is the Victorian period that becomes the focus for her traveling and, eventually, for the resolution of her problems with her father.

The production aims for a lighthearted, fantasy style--the sort of approach that might have worked with Gene Wilder in the cast. But there’s no Gene Wilder here, and the predictable manner in which the scenes unfold creates a slogging sort of pace that dilutes any potential for fantasy.

Some of the scenes in which characters encounter artifacts from beyond their eras have charming moments--a Victorian child’s first encounter with a Walkman cassette player, for example. But Busfield’s rendering of Frank Shawson gets a bit heavy-handed at times, and the screenplay--by Linda Brookover and Alain Silver--too often has the dialogue pacing of a Nancy Drew novel.

Like most time-travel pictures, “Time at the Top,” despite its good intentions, sometimes gets trapped in the essential conundrums of the relationship between the past and the present. And, unfortunately, the story’s climax--attractive though it may be as a happy ending--poses the most essential conundrum of all: Can characters return to the past without jeopardizing the fact of their very existence in the present?

* “Time at the Top” airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-G (appropriate for all ages).