The Ministry of Time, the latest television project announced by the BBC, is at the center of controversy. From Spain, the production is accused of being a plagiarism of The Ministry of Time, both due to the title and the plot of the fiction, which is based on a government ministry with agents from different stages of history. But according to Kaliene Bradley, the author of the book on which it is based, it is not a copy.
“My literary debut, The Ministry of Time, published this May, is an original work of fiction. “I have never seen the Spanish series and the identical titles are an unfortunate coincidence,” she said in a statement through Aitken Alexander Associates, the agency that represents her, after this media outlet contacted the BBC.
The BBC has an even more standard answer to the question. “The BBC adaptation of Kaliane Bradley's upcoming debut novel is part romance, sci-fi and thriller, focusing on the story's expats adjusting to life in modern-day Britain. It focuses on the love story between a 21st century woman and Graham Gore, the 19th century Arctic explorer,” they responded when asked.
It is difficult for these explanations to be sufficient for RTVE, which broadcast the creation of Javier and Pablo Olivares between 2015 and 2020: “Neither RTVE nor the production company of The Ministry of Time have granted any license to the BBC or production companies for its adaptation. Rtve will request explanations from the BBC about the announcement it made without prejudice to the rights it has in defense of its interests.”
It is not the first time that Javier Olivares has found himself in a similar situation: the CBS channel and the Sony studio produced Timeless, a 2016 work that plagiarized the starting point of The Ministry of Time although two scriptwriters as veteran as Eric Kripke (Supernatural , The Boys) and Shawn Ryan (The Shield, The Night Agent) defended that they were working on an original series. The case went to court and was settled out of court in May 2017.
Javier Olivares, the affected creator, considers that the appearance of The Ministry of Time, which Alice Birch (Inseparables) must adapt to television, is not a coincidence. “Someone has scored a goal – and an own goal – against the BBC,” he expressed on social networks. And he is surprised that no one from the British public channel knew about The Ministry of Time considering that it was broadcast in the United Kingdom via Netflix and that the American media covered the Timeless plagiarism case.
Furthermore, he highlights that there is a review of Bradley's book, published on January 1, where there was already talk of an obvious similarity and, to make matters worse, if a user types "Ministry of Time" in Google, precisely the Spanish series headed by Nacho Fresneda, Aura Garrido and Rodolfo Sancho.
“I can't say that I rated this fairly, that I took into account the author's style or the character development,” explained the user who published a review of the still unpublished The Ministry of Time, “since I feel that a story that “benefits from blatant plagiarism of a previous work of fiction deserves nothing more than one star.”
The criticism referred to by Olivares argued that, although time travel is a common resource of the genre, the similarities between Bradley's novel and the work of the Olivares brothers could not be overlooked: “Bradley simply took the premise of the television series and somehow made it very bland.”
