Fresh Air - The Dictator Playbook

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

Autocracy, Inc. author Anne Applebaum says today's dictators — including Putin and Xi — are working together in a global fight to dismantle democracy, and Trump is borrowing from their playbook: "We're going to have to defend and protect our political system if we want to keep it." Also, David Bianculli reviews the Apple TV series Time Bandits.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is Anne Applebaum, who's been writing for years about the rise in authoritarianism around the world and the erosion of democracy. Her latest book, Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, is a potent read on how today's autocracies are not just ruled by one powerful leader, but are instead a sophisticated, interconnected network. She reveals how they collaborate and support each other through financial systems, technology, and propaganda that spans well beyond their borders. This loose network, which includes nations like Russia, China, and North Korea, isn't an alliance. They don't share an ideology. But they do have one thing in common. They don't like us, and they're growing more powerful in the fight

against democracy. Applebaum says in order to fight this threat, democracies like the U.S. have to fundamentally reorient their policies. Ann Applebaum is the author of several books, including Gulag, a history, which won the Pulitzer Prize, Iron Curtain, The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944 to 1956, and the best-selling Twilight of Democracy, The Seductive Lore of Authoritarianism. She's a columnist for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Anne Applebaum, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. In your last book, The Twilight of Democracy, you were focused on those who make a tyrant Thanks for having me. that is semi-organized, almost like a corporation. Can you elaborate on this analogy?

Yes, I actually chose the title or the expression Autocracy, Inc. to describe them because I was looking for a word that evoked their form of organization because it's not an alliance. They don't have a guiding principle. It's not really an axis because that implies they're unified in some way. There isn't a secret room like in a James Bond movie where all the leaders meet. You know, it doesn't, it's not like that. It's more a kind of network of convenience. So around certain issues, where they find they care

about the same things, they cooperate. They have plenty of differences. They don't share the same ideology. Nationalist Russia and communist China and Bolivarian socialist Venezuela and theocratic Iran, it's like a big corporation that has different companies, you know, and each company does its own thing, but they have loose ties and they cooperate when it's convenient. And that's a little bit how this new alliance works. And because it's different from older alliances or older accesses or older blocks that we're used to thinking about, I thought it needed a new name. I'm very anxious that our conflict with them not be described as a Cold War, because that's a little lazy. You named Iran and Russia and some of the others. If there were a table set for members of Autocracy, Inc., what leaders might be at the head of it? So at the head of it, you would find Putin,

the president of Russia. You would find Xi Jinping, the dictator of China. You would certainly find the Iranian leaders, either the newly elected leader of Iran or one of the religious leaders. You would find the leader of North Korea. You would find leaders of an assorted group of African states, a few other Asian states, some Central Asian states. You might also find, and this is what makes this group, again, different from the Cold War block of the past, is you might also find some states that were there some of the time and sometimes not. So you would find Erdogan, the leader of Turkey,

which sometimes cooperates with the autocratic world and sometimes he doesn't. You would find Viktor Orban, whose country is technically a member of NATO and a member of the European Union, who also seeks close ties with this alliance. You would find the Gulf states, I should say, who sometimes cooperate with the democratic world and sometimes don't. So it's an alliance that comes together in different forms depending on what the issue is, whether it's kleptocracy, whether it's their shared authoritarian narratives, whether they have some common military influence, interests rather, or geopolitical interests. And depending on what the issue or subject is, they have different relationships. You call the war in Ukraine the first full-scale kinetic battle

in the struggle between autocracy, Inc., and what might loosely be described as the democratic world. What were the first indications to you that Vladimir Putin wanted to basically show the world that the old rules of international behavior no longer applied? Putin has, in fact, been saying this for some time. He began using the language of, not just of nostalgia for the Soviet past, but also of challenge to what he perceives as the American-dominated or Western-dominated present for a good couple of decades. More recently, in the last few years, he had begun talking about the end of the democratic world or the end of democratic dominance. And I think with this war, with this invasion, and particularly with

the brutality that accompanied it, the construction of concentration camps in occupied territories, the use of torture against Ukrainian citizens, the kidnapping of children, he's kidnapped thousands of children and taken them to Russia and given them new identities. The war was an attempt to show that he doesn't care anymore about the world that was created in 1945. He doesn't care about the UN charter. He doesn't care about UN documents and organizations that use the language of human rights. He doesn't care about the so-called unspoken rule or unwritten rule that we don't change borders in Europe by force. We all learned this lesson after the Second World War that power and conflict, this was not the way to resolve our difficulties and everything in Europe would be resolved by negotiation and through institutions. He is saying he doesn't care about any of those institutions.

He's going to show that they don't work anymore. He's going to show that NATO is powerless, that it's a paper tiger, and that none of the international institutions can control him because specifically said, this war is about a new world order. In some of the language and some of the meetings Putin has had with Xi Jinping, they also use language like that. And so their goal is to show that none of that matters and that they can do whatever they want. And, you know, might makes right. Well, I mean, right away, though, once the invasion happened, the U.S. and several other places did things like impose sanctions on Russia. So 50 countries provided money and weapons and intelligence to Ukraine. But you write that while Putin might have underestimated the unity that then came from that invasion, democracies have underestimated the scale of the challenge when

it comes to autocracy, Inc., as we think of it. Can you say more about what you mean there? Yeah, so it's true. And I mean, that's an excellent point. I mean, Putin assumed that there would be no response to his invasion. He did not expect NATO to organize itself. He didn't expect the U.S. and also countries around the world, South Korea, Australia, many others, to contribute to the defense of Ukraine. So, that was all a surprise for him. He expected the war to be won in a few weeks. But it's also true that we imagined that our sanctions and that our combined military effort would end the war more quickly than they did. We didn't count on the Chinese, for example, continuing to sell not so much weapons, but the ingredients for weapons, you know, the components

of weapons, you know, whether it's chips or whether it's electronics or whether it's material that's used to make explosives. We didn't count on the many ways in which other kinds of countries and entities would seek ways around the sanctions, whether it's smugglers going through Turkey and Georgia, or whether it's India continuing to buy Russian oil. You know, we assumed that our economic power was such that we could essentially shut down the Russian economy. And although it's true that we have damaged it and that the living standards in Russia have dropped and there is a kind of ongoing slow economic emergency in Russia, we didn't foresee all the ways in which the Russians would find ways around these sanctions. And I think, I mean, this is really, it was really overdue because we knew this about sanctions on other countries in the past. But I think finally, I mean, really just about now,

the leaders of, particularly European leaders and officials in the United States, have begun to look at closing down some of those loopholes. You know, are there secondary sanctions that we could use on the Chinese companies? Who else can we cut out of the financial markets? But, you know, are there secondary sanctions that we could use on the Chinese companies? Who else can we cut out of the financial markets? But, you know, but it took a long time for us to understand that there was this other network. You write about some of the business relationships between autocratic and democratic nations in great detail. And I want to talk about this. How do these relationships complicate the fight against the growth of anti-democratic ideals? So in my view, the rise of these new forms of autocracy

were made possible by the nature of modern financial transactions. If you look closely at the rise of Putin, and I do talk about this in the book, it's been written about before, but I felt it needed retelling in this context, the story of how he came to power. And he began essentially by stealing money. He stole money from the city of St. Petersburg. He took it out of the country. He laundered it through Western institutions, brought it back in. And he and others, mostly in the former KGB who were doing this, eventually enriched themselves. And they enriched themselves using Western partners, Western companies, you know, connections to the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. They, you know,

they had a, they were enabled in this process by Western financial institutions, German, European, American. And first of all, that gave them a certain cynicism about the Western world. It was, oh, okay, you guys talk about democracy and transparency, but you're perfectly willing to help us steal. But it also meant that the kind of power they enjoyed is very different from the kind of power people had in the Soviet Union, for example. So these are very, very rich people. And they use their money to keep in power, but and they can also buy Americans and Europeans and others. The money helped them get there and it helps them stay there. And Putin was really the originator of this, but you can then see in lots of other countries, even places where there was a lot of traditional kind of ordinary corruption, you can see modern dictators also beginning to learn this, also beginning to understand they can use tax havens or they can, you know, filter their money through Western banks or there are different ways of stealing and hiding money. And it' motivations for wanting to do business in this way. But where did the idea that democracies could over time, through business and other dealings, slowly bring democratic values to autocracies? So originally, so in the 1990s, there was a hope. And by the way, the hope was shared by a lot of people. So I'm not blaming anybody for it. There was a hope in the US, in the UK, but also in Russia and China, but with others as well, that trade would lead to, if not exactly democracy, then at least to openness, to greater integration, to more liberal societies, you know, more compatible societies. And it felt for a long

time like that was happening. It seemed that way, at least on the outside. And that offered the business communities in the West, it meant that they weren't merely being greedy, you know, in investing and buying property and enriching people in that part of the world. They were also maybe creating the basis for future relationships. So it was a kind of, it was a very comfortable idea. People were enthusiastic about it because it was sort of felt mutually beneficial. What we didn't see, we didn't see the degree to which our own companies and especially our financial sector were in fact helping to enrich small groups of people who then once they had power were reluctant to ever give it up. I mean, there's an interesting conversation I had with a Ukrainian friend of mine recently who described how kleptocracy, so ill-gotten gains, large amounts of money, leads inevitably to autocracy because people who have stolen money

and who have used that money to retain power don't want to give it up. And so, of course, when people start talking about transparency or the rule of law or there begin to be anti-corruption movements, they immediately push back on them. They, you know, first they harass them, then they undermine them, then maybe they arrest them. And the need to create a police state comes from this need to protect the money. And that's what happened in Russia. That's actually what was happening in Ukraine up until 2014 when the Ukrainians organized a movement. The Ukrainian revolution of 2014 was really an anti-corruption revolution. That was what motivated and inspired people. And anti-corruption and democracy were seen to be similar and compatible. This central interest, kleptocracy, the ability to take money and hide it without worrying about accountability or public debate. You write about this happening in our own backyard, in places like Delaware and Wyoming and South Dakota. These are places that are used as tax havens where nameless investors can hide money.

Yep. So we have a number of American states and some of this is changing. The Senate has been progressing. Congress has been progressing on passing laws to contain some of this. But for a long time, there were several American states that allowed people to set up anonymous companies. So you could very quickly, in sometimes a matter of minutes, create a company whose true owner was hidden. You know, the paperwork didn't reveal who it was. In some states, it's trusts, you can create an anonymous trust. And the purpose of that facility was that people who had some reason to do business anonymously, whether it was because they were hiding money from the tax office or whether it's because it was stolen money or maybe they were,

as a friend of mine likes to say, don't underestimate how many people are hiding it from their ex-spouses. Whatever reason they had to hide money, that's what these companies are able to do. We also had a system, again, beginning to break down somewhat in particular places, whereby it was very, very easy to buy property, to buy real estate anonymously. I did not know this. I'm sorry. I just didn't realize that in the United States it's possible to buy property anonymously. No, no, it was. And in fact, you know, during Trump's, President Trump's first, during his presidency, many people asked, how come we can't know who's buying Trump condos?

I mean, people were investing in Trump properties anonymously and we had no way of finding out who they were. If those were bribes, we don't know. And there was a, and because other, anonymously and we had no way of finding out who they were. If those were bribes, we don't know. And because in other industries, people who were doing business had to know more about the people they were encountering and they were exchanging money with. In real estate, it was very easy. You didn't have to really know anything. So an anonymous company could buy a property, they could own it, they could run it without anybody on the outside having any idea who it was. And this has actually, I think, helped negatively shape a lot of our

cities. I mean, actually, the most notorious one is London, which is a city where there's an enormous amount of foreign oligarchic and kleptocratic wealth and where lots of new buildings that maybe wouldn't have built otherwise are almost empty because the apartments in them are really, they function like Swiss bank accounts. I mean, they're just places for people to store and hide money. And at the same time, there's enormous housing shortage. So young people have trouble buying houses there. And so this is not a small problem. I mean, it's really, it's shaped the architecture of a lot of our cities. And what you're also asserting in this book is that these business dealings impact culture.

Because what you're pointing out is that anti-democratic influence is a two-way street, meaning that anti-democratic values could also and would also make their way back here to the United States. Can you give us an example of that? Well, this was another mistake of the 1990s. So we had the idea that the influence would flow one way, that democracy would somehow and ideas about rule of law would somehow influence the autocracies would begin to seek to create and promote their own narratives inside democratic countries. And so whether it's the narrative used by the Russians, promoted by the Russians, but also by other foreign states that describes America and the West as unstable and degenerate, by which they sometimes mean sexually degenerate, and declining, which is language you can hear coming from the American far right, by the way,

and sometimes from the American far left, but also the European far right and the European far left. Or whether it's the values of the Russian oligarchs who dominate so much of business in London, that the influence of those states, both their ideas and their practices and their ways of doing business on us has really, I think, been quite significant and profound. Our guest today is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum. She's written a new book, Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate

with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. like sponsor-free listening, bonus episodes, early access, shop discounts, and more for over 20 different NPR podcasts like this one. Support what you love and stop hearing promos like this one at plus.npr.org. And I want to talk about how autocracies control the narrative. Can you explain more about what you call information laundering and how Autocracy, Inc. uses the press and these dubious news outlets to spread its narrative? You gave one example about the way that the U.S. is portrayed in some of those countries. So I should start by saying that the autocratic world takes ideas very television and radio and website and newspaper and other forms of broadcasting in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia and elsewhere.

They have content sharing agreements with different newspapers around the world. Their wire service, Xinhua, is very cheap and easy to get hold of, very often cheaper than AP or Reuters. And they also think about how they can get information to people in a way that they'll accept. They have an idea that you want information to seem native, that it will seem local. And so they would rather have an African newspaper, you know, write something positive about China or write something negative about America rather than it coming from a Chinese source. And the Russians in particular have enthusiastically run with that idea. And they have also begun pretty systematically to create websites, newspapers, and other forms of media that look like they are Ecuadorian or Peruvian or they're in Arabic or they're in French. There's a big

network of these outlets in France and Germany. And they look native. They're using local languages, but they rely on, as I said, on Russian narratives, and especially on these authoritarian narratives about how, you know, about the degeneracy and decline of America and the West, about the superiority of autocratic states. Sometimes they have very specific goals and tasks. And so the one that I talk about a lot in the book that I followed across around the world in a way was a story that began to be repeated at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. And this was a conspiracy theory that came originally from Russian officials

that said that the United States had been building biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine, so-called bio labs. And the Russians said it, the US denied it, then there were a UN investigating group refuted it, it was refuted and denied and, you know, fact checked many times. Nevertheless, the Russians continued to push it. They were also pushed on Chinese media. So the Chinese also repeated the same set of narratives. You could find them in Venezuelan media. You could find them in multiple places around the world. Right. Sometimes you say the point isn't to make people believe the lie. It's to make people fear the liar.

So this is another aspect of authoritarian propaganda in the modern world is that a number of those states, and again, Russia is – we keep talking about Russia, although I could talk about many others. Syria is another good example in this case, use lies not so much to try and bamboozle people, but they use lies in order to show they're powerful enough to lie. So the Syrian leadership, when they do propaganda saying what a marvelous tourist destination Syria has become under the reign of Assad, nobody believes that. It's a series of war zone. But the lie, you know, because he's able to lie and nobody can contradict him in public, that shows the power of the dictator. And so that's one of the ways in which lies are used. And you can obviously see that in U.S. politics as well. There's a second way in which lies are used, which is by issuing huge numbers of them, one after the next.

Again, this was originally a Russian tactic now used by all kinds of people in U.S. politics as well. And in the case, right, in the case of Donald Trump, he set the narrative by dominating the conversation on social media in 2016. Yep. And the constant stream of lies, even incredible, unbelievable ones. I mean, actually, Trump began his presidency with a lie about how many people had appeared on the National Mall for his inauguration. I don't know if your memory stretches back that far. It feels like so many things have happened since then. But it was a very stupid lie. I mean, who cares how many people were on the National Mall?

But he wanted the U.S. Park Service to lie about it. He wanted his press spokesman to lie about it. And again, that was partly to show who's in control here. I'm in control and I get to decide what the truth is. And it's also to confuse people and alienate them from politics. I mean, during the Trump administration, we spent a lot of time arguing about what was true and what wasn't. And for some people, they hear that conversation and they say, right, this is how do I know what's true? I'm just checking out, you know, so constant lies also create this kind of cynicism and apathy. It's a way of keeping people out of politics and preventing civic engagement. I mean, a lot of these

authoritarian states know that their biggest enemy, their biggest threat to their power is their own people. And so their goal is to prevent people from ever organizing, from ever being engaged, from ever caring at all. And one of the ways they do that is through this constant stream of lies that make people feel like they're simply unable to know anymore what's true and what's not. And you also, I mean, to a certain extent, you write more about this in your previous book, Twilight of Democracy. But why isn't it easy for citizens to actually fight back against this, even when they know they're being lied to? What are some of the reasons we're seeing right now also that there's this growing support for authoritarianism and this network of autocratic leaders? I think it's because their narratives are designed to make people feel helpless and hopeless. You know, the way we did politics even 10 years ago, which was we argued about real things, right? We argued about healthcare, or we argued about, I don't know, infrastructure investment, or, you know, where, you know, where,

you know, and locally, you know, should we build the road here or should we build it on the other side of town? You know, it's a, that was the stuff that politics was supposed to be about. Once politics isn't about that anymore, once it's about existential questions and identity, and once it's only culture wars, which, you know, which are easily exaggerated, and you can tell cherry-picked stories one way or the other about the United States. And once it's about that, then you're in the realm where it's much easier for demagogues and for people who are good at evoking and creating emotion to win arguments. And I think it just took a long time for the opposition forces to understand how this works. I mean, I have to say that during the 2020 election campaign,

the Biden campaign at the time did seek to do this. They, you know, instead of talking about culture war as an identity and so on, they sought to bring the argument back to, you know, people who, you know, we understand that you go to work every day to help your children. And there was an ad like this, you know, and we will work with you to make your life easier. I mean, that was that kind of narrative. A successful counter to authoritarian propaganda in the U.S. has to do that. You don't write much about Donald Trump in this book, but many of your descriptions of autocratic leaders sound like him. And we just saw how the Russian foreign minister praised the nomination of Senator J.D. Vance as Trump's VP nominee. How does Trump fit into your broader theory of Autocracy, Inc.? So it's funny, when I first thought of writing the book, which was a couple of years ago,

I didn't, I wasn't thinking about Trump being a presidential candidate again. So it wasn't top of my mind. But obviously, the book should, you know, I hope it helps voters understand the nature of the modern world and the way in which a second Trump presidency, especially given the selection of J.D. Vance and given the people who are now around Trump, the way in which it might go. So there is a real threat that the United States of America is no longer seeing itself as a democracy leading other democracies, you know, allied to other free states in the world, but begins to

see itself as a transactional power, the way the leaders of many of these other, many autocracies do, that's interested in either in the personal wealth and influence of the leader of the president, that would give, you know, simply being someone who's interested in using foreign policy to make money for oneself. I mean that already makes Trump similar to a lot of Central Asian leaders or said, not as a power that seeks to unite the democratic world, but, you know, that might align one day with Russia and one day with China and one day with somebody else. And then we would already be living on a really different planet. I actually had a German colleague of mine, a member of the German parliament of the Bundestag, said to me recently, you know, we Europeans are beginning to ask ourselves, what will the world look like when we're facing challenges from three dictatorships, Russia, China, and the United States. And even to have someone say that in all seriousness, gives you some idea of the scale of the shift in perceptions that are beginning to develop around the United States. People who used to be our friends are now afraid of what the U.S. might do and what it might become.

Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, we're talking to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum, author of the new book Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. Are there other elements of the Autocracy, Inc. playbook that democracies could take or learn from that aren't anti-democratic? I mean, we could certainly learn from their something I mentioned earlier, which is their single-minded focus on the war of ideas. You know, for a long time, certainly since the end of the Cold War gave us this feeling that our political system was the best and it was inevitably the best, we took for granted the idea that

somehow, you know, information was like was another free market, you know, and there would be a competition in the market between good ideas and bad ideas. And eventually the good ideas would win. That's actually not how it works. And that's not how the news business works anymore. It's not how information works. And understanding how important it is and how important it is to engage in it, both in our country and around the world, I think would do us a lot of good. I mean, we sort of stopped competing, again, out of complacency, out of the assumption that everybody would eventually agree with us. We didn't really have to do anything. We didn't have to try very hard.

I think we misunderstood that. I also think we could learn a lot from the opposition to autocracies in their own country. So, you know, it was the Russian opposition, specifically it was the Navalny movement, who taught me the most about kleptocracy and how the Western financial system was enabling the rise of dictatorship in Russia. So they were the ones who tracked this. They understood it. They began talking about it a decade ago. This was Navalny's, Alexei Navalny's, late Alexei Navalny's main idea. He didn't, when he began to build support, and when he created, at one point he had offices and supporters all over the country. His support was for transparency, for anti-corruption and for an end to the kleptocratic regime.

He didn't so much use the language of human rights. It was really transparency. And I think we can learn from them. I mean they understand those regimes better than we do. We don't spend enough time listening to them. And I think we could. You give quite a few ideas on solutions, ways forward, ways that democracies can actually fight back against Autocracy, Inc. The book is important. It's also really sobering, and it also feels daunting, which also can feel pessimistic. You say pessimism is irresponsible. What do you want us to take away from this book?

I want people to be convinced that ideas matter, that we're going to have to defend and protect our political system if we want to keep it. We have to do that around the world, but we also have to do it in our own country. So much of what I suggest is to do with changing the way things are done in the United States. And much of it is also to do with people becoming engaged in public life, in understanding what's happening, not just voting, but participating. What autocrats, whether they're in American politics or in Russian politics or in Chinese politics, what they want is for you to be disengaged. They want you to drop out. They want you to become overwhelmed. And they want you to, you know, to say, I can't do anything. It's all hopeless. So it's very important about the flaws of the United States and our democracy, it's still better than the autocratic world. And I should also say it's still the case that our ideas are the ones that people in the autocratic world wish they had.

The people who are really the most eloquent spokesmen for freedom of speech aren't the kind of free speech warriors in America. They're Russians who don't have it. And the people who are the greatest advocates for transparency in the rule of law are also people who live in states where they don't have it. And remembering that these are things that we have, that they're under threat, and they need to be protected and defended, I think is extremely important. Anne Applebaum, thank you so much for this book and thank you for this conversation. Thanks for all of your time. It's a hard subject.

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Her new book is called Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Coming up, TV critic David Bianculli reviews the Apple TV Plus series Time Bandits. This is Fresh Air. Terry Gilliam's 1981 cult film Time Bandits, about a gang of thieves traveling through time to steal treasures at different points in history, is being remade as a 10-part family series for Apple TV+. The central premise of Time Hopping Misfits remains the same, but almost everything else is different about the new series, which comes from the makers of What We Do in the Shadows and stars Lisa Kudrow from the NBC sitcom Friends. Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review. The original Time Bandits movie came out in 1981, written by Monty Python members Terry Gilliam and

Michael Palin and directed by Gilliam. It was about a small group of time-traveling bandits who roamed the world and the ages, looking for treasures to plunder. In the original movie, all of the so-called time bandits were played by little people, actors with dwarfism, and on their travels, they ended up being accompanied by a wide-eyed, history-loving young boy. More than 40 years later,

Apple TV Plus is launching a 10-part TV series remake. It comes from three collaborators on the delightful FX vampire comedy series What We Do in the Shadows, Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi, and Ian Morris. That series, too, was adapted from a cult movie, and this team really knows what it's doing. Each of them contributes as writers on the TV version. Clement and Morris are showrunners, and Clement and Waititi not only direct a few episodes, but appear in them, too, playing their respective embodiments of good and evil. The major change this time is in the casting of the team of misfit marauders known as the Time Bandits themselves. In the new TV version, they are no longer played by dwarfs.

This already has proven a bit controversial. Some have accused the producers of taking away roles for little people, or erasing a key ingredient of the original narrative. Later in the series, though, new roles emerge, as little people are featured as a sort of celestial original narrative. Later in the series, though, new roles emerge as little people are featured as a sort of celestial detective squad. And the new Time Bandits makes its change very easy to accept. The leader of the new Time Bandits is played by Lisa Kudrow from Friends in a clever comic performance. The story's core, however, remains intact. The tale begins when these time travelers, chased by Vikings from an earlier era, crash through the wardrobe into the bedroom of an

11-year-old boy named Kevin. He's a nerdy, hardcore history buff, which doesn't impress his parents so much as it concerns them, even after he comes to them with tales of being chased by Vikings in his bedroom. Kal-El Tuck plays Kevin, and James Dryden and Felicity Ward play his unimpressed, unsympathetic parents. You're stuck in the past, Kevin. You've got to get in the 21st century. If it were cooler to be a Viking than an accountant for a consultancy firm, or a consultant for an accountancy firm, we'd be wearing horned helmets, wouldn't we? Vikings didn't wear horned helmets. That's a misconception.

No, Kevin. No. You've got to stop it with all these Vikings and their ancient geeks. Greeks. As well. I give up. Then this talk was worth it as you've learned an important lesson. Sometimes give up.

Wait, that's the lesson? Sometimes, give up? Yeah. When the Time Bandits return with other factions in hot pursuit, young Kevin ends up going with them on their time travels, starting with a visit to ancient China, where the Time Bandits find themselves surrounded by a deadly ruler and her sword-carrying underlings. Penelope, the time bandit played by Lisa Kudrow, confronts the Chinese leader, but gingerly. Okay, we really need to get out of here. You have 30 seconds to tell me who you are and what you are doing in my cabin, or I will kill you. I am Penelope, and although we don't ascribe to a traditional structure of leadership, I am in effect the leader.

Fundamentally, though, we are all equal. Fundamentally, I will kill you all equally. Eventually, the bandits and Kevin travel to Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China, and from the Ice Age to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. They use a special map as a navigation tool, a map that's actually a blueprint, a literal plan for the universe. They stole it from the supreme being, played by Taika Waititi, who wants it back in the worst way.

Well, not the worst way, because the blueprint also is sought by the embodiment of pure evil, played by Jemaine Clement, who, talking to his demonic underlings, does some hilarious scene-stealing. With those plans, I could create a universe of pure evil. Rats would eat cats. Parrots would shout out insults at you throughout the night, never letting you sleep. Everywhere you go would be up. You start from point A, go to point B, it's up. And then when you go from point B back to point A, also up. I've thought it out.

It would work. Instead of water, acid. Instead of flowers, thorns. Some people will have eyes in their buttocks, so you have to make a choice. Walk around naked and see, or wear pants and be blind. And everything. I can't tell you how much sheer fun this new Time Bandits is, but I'll try. Its time travel is the most delightfully playful since Mr. Peabody set his wayback machine on Rocky and Bullwinkle. It's as enjoyable as any of Bill and

Ted's adventures, or any trips taken in Doctor Who's TARDIS, or in The DeLorean with Marty McFly. The gang of thieves in Time Bandits also ends up being as charming and amusing, individually and collectively, as the ones in The Princess Bride. Obviously, ideas for this new series are borrowed freely and frequently. Even the translation caps used by the Time Bandits owe a clear debt to the instantly translating Babblefish from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But everything works, including the moments of sadness and tension. The TV series Time Bandits is much better, actually, than the movie that inspired it, with production design, direction, and acting that are equally impressive throughout.

When you travel with these Time Bandits, the time really does fly. Enjoyably. David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed the series Time Bandits. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, John M. Chu, the director behind Crazy Rich Asians, and a forthcoming adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked. He'll talk about being raised by immigrant parents in Silicon Valley and making movies. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Freshers executive producer is Danny Miller.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Teresa Madden, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nakundi, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley. This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly. What if everyone at work were an expert communicator? Inbox numbers would drop, customer satisfaction scores would rise, and everyone would be more productive. That's what happens when you give Grammarly to your entire team. Grammarly is a secure AI writing partner that understands your business and can transform it through better communication.

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