Date of airing: October 3, 2016 (NBC)
Nielsen ratings information: 7.597 million viewers, 4.9/9 in Households, 1.83/6 with Adults 18-49, 1.1/5 with Adults 18-34, 2.4/7 with Adults 25-54
Here is a question for the few folks who are catching themselves reading this wall of text: Can you judge a TV show by its one-sheet poster? There are TV shows with pretty posters and very pretty posters, and most of the TV landscape doesn’t care too much about them and just throws a couple of main characters on them, with a low-key background and the show’s title on the top or bottom. But every once in a while, there are the posters that make even me roll my eyes. The all-white poster for ABC’s CHARLIE’S ANGELS from 2011 was such a case, and even today it brings a shiver over me when I think about how this poster made it through the advertising department. But that poster isn’t the worst any longer, because, in 2016, TIMELESS has delivered a one-sheet where I have no idea what’s top and what’s bottom and why every character head on it seems to look in a different direction, while multiple scenes were playing around them. It’s a poster filled with information, and none of them tells you anything about the show. It’s also a poster without any sort of consistency. The size of the characters, the size of the events playing out left and right, even the coloring…
Looking at that poster when it was released right before TIMELESS premiered on NBC, it already didn’t promise me anything good about the show. I was already expecting a complicated relationship between myself and TIMELESS when I heard about it (a somewhat proceduralized time travel action adventure with an ongoing mystery plot on a broadcast network? As if that has ever worked out since they tried to emulate the success of LOST...), but the poster made me want to hate the show from the get-go. And as I was watching the pilot, I was prepared to hate it and I wanted to troll it. This means if the pilot was even in the slightest what you could consider “good,” my expectations had been exceeded and the show would be good.
Well, two things happened: The pilot isn’t good. It was also not terrible enough for me to hate it, because I realized that the premise could be an exciting one, even if it’s just a twenty-first-century upgrade of QUANTUM LEAP and THE TIME TUNNEL with an ounce of terrorism included. I don’t mind seeing reenactments of historical events in time when they are good enough for the story and excitingly put on screen, and as long as they don’t become fixtures of the show’s timeline by having those fixtures be the cornerstones of actual American history. Who knows, maybe the villains of TIMELESS tried to assassinate all the sitting US presidents (I’m already looking forward to the 11/22/63 episode). Maybe it was one of the time travel devices that crashed in Roswell, instead of a UFO. Maybe it’s one of the main characters who is about to be discovered in multiple historic photographs (think THE AGE OF ADALINE). It’s a simple premise, and one that’s easy to write because the episodes’ synopses have already been written (the history already exists), and here’s to hoping that the show didn’t go down the predictable route and all of a sudden American history only exists because of the main characters of TIMELESS.
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| It takes a good history professor to make me care about history. |
But I said already that this was not a good pilot, and here is the reason: It was too short, and the technological aspect of the time travel device was not delivered at all. I have no idea how time travel works in this show because the writers never cared about making their premise scientifically coherent. Back in 1998, SEVEN DAYS delivered a two-hour pilot, and it had an entire act explaining how the technology works and how it’s expected to change the world. There was absolutely nothing of it in TIMELESS, and for some reason, the story needed to jump into the Hindenburg tragedy right away, since that is what the producers thought the audience wanted to see. Within 15 minutes, the characters landed in 1937. Within 45 minutes, the episode ate the initial premise, the characters’ introductions, the time travel technology, the Hindenburg story, and the obvious mythological plot behind the time travel procedural for breakfast, and there wasn’t time for any of these elements to shine and be good or interesting. After 45 minutes, I not only don’t know the characters to care about them, but even the Hindenburg story was written like the episode didn’t want to focus on it at all and instead just used it for the visuals.
Now I have concerns about the rest of the show, during which important milestones in American history are being chewed like this, by having the characters speed through them without anyone focusing on what is happening. That makes TIMELESS an incredibly fast-paced plot show – an adventure where characters live a hectic life, but don’t become characters because their hectic life is bigger and more important for the writers. In addition to that, I’m smelling predictable outcomes to the stories. I was expecting Flynn to be more than just a terrorist from the present and he confirmed it when he was talking to Lucy about her diary she has yet to write. I was expecting Flynn to safely bring down the Hindenburg the first time around (because why would he be in that time anyway – killing the remaining survivor is nothing compared to saving all the intended victims). And I am expecting Flynn and the other time travelers to take part in whatever major American moment of history the show wanted to deliver, depicting that the history we know only happened because of the characters’ involvements. I was also expecting that Kate would die in this episode, showing that fate still takes charge and that the universe course corrects changes in time, to take a phrase from LOST. What I did not see coming, however, was that, even though the Hindenburg eventually crashed and burned (again, the universe course correcting), most of the intended victims survived, changing history and essentially Lucy, Wyatt, and Rufus’s lives.
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| Ugh... Tourists... |
The latter thing was also part of the 2002 THE TIME TUNNEL pilot, only reversed. The characters came from a time when things were changed already, and the events shown in the pilot would eventually lead to the history we all know. That TIMELESS would go the easy route and change the history in front of our eyes is the easy way out, and a little bit the lazy way out of the premise. Even though seeing the changing of history could give the audience a couple of WTF moments, depending on the severity of the changes, the writers pretty much guaranteed themselves that the present timeline is going to change after every somewhat failed time travel mission. That means if the writers didn’t like a story choice they have taken in the present storyline, they just needed to fake the outcome of the mission a little bit, and voila, the changes have happened. TIMELESS is Christmas time for TV writers who want to erase their bad storytelling choices because you can literally undo them with time travel.
Meanwhile, the visuals were good enough. Of course, a crashing and burning Hindenburg can’t keep up with twenty-first-century special effects these days, but I’m having hopes that the show will try its best to portray history in the hour it has by not focusing too heavily on CGI. I have hopes that the trips back in time won’t just be throwbacks to important moments in American history, and become something of a period piece instead. I can’t remember QUANTUM LEAP enough, and I can only remember the Titanic episode of the original THE TIME TUNNEL (which means it’s time to get back to watch both shows, especially since QUANTUM LEAP has returned recently), but with TIMELESS going all over the place in time, period piece episodes will have to be a thing. And it’s something broadcast television hasn’t shown in a while. By the way: The visual of the main characters’ silhouettes quickly mourning Kate’s death in front of the burning Hindenburg was very nice. For a moment I stopped wanting to hate the show and just admire its beauty.
I can’t say much about the cast, because they did the most solid job they could do under these circumstances. Their characters aren’t fleshed out, but I like the cast members enough to want to follow them for a little while. Abigail Spencer has been fantastic on RECTIFY, and Matt Lanter is seriously starting to grow on me, even if his characters in 90210 and STAR-CROSSED were weird or boring. And I can watch a lot more of Goran Visnjic, though he will always be Luka Kovac to me, which means I will have difficulties buying his villainous persona. But then again, I’m expecting Flynn not to be the villain at all. Maybe he wants to destroy America to save America – who knows what the country looks like in his future. Who knows what the country has done in the future. Maybe America simply needs to stop existing for the world to be saved.
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| It's a very hot and deadly situation for the time travel team. |
All in all, I’m still not expecting anything from the show. It’s going to be another THE TIME TUNNEL version, in which the characters try to prevent new disasters from happening as Frank B. Parker did on SEVEN DAYS. TIMELESS is not a unique show and the stories have already been seen, but it was in the hands of the writers now to make something special with the premise. Unfortunately, I don’t have much trust in the writers when the pilot already gave me a sense of the number of network notes they had to deal with, which prohibited TIMELESS from being more than just a weekly history lesson of American history with options of change.
