Are you looking for the next great Television drama? One of those shows that sends your jaw to the floor every week and leaves you in chills? Well you should probably stop reading this then because Timeless is not going to be that show. Try Westworld or Pitch or something among those lines. Watch The Americans if you haven't yet. Now are you looking for something that's utterly ridiculous and quite flawed, but manages to sell it with a game cast and pure audacity? Well then, you just might want to check out Timeless, which debuted tonight on NBC.
Created by Eric Kripke (Supernatural) and Shawn Ryan (The Shield), Timeless establishes its premise and characters at breakneck pace. We open with the Hindenburg disaster. Then we cut to a present-day lab where primary villain Garcia Flynn (a fairly menacing Goran Visnjic) and some henchman steal a big machine and disappear into thin air. We then meet our hero, history Professor Lucy Preston (A wonderful Abigail Spencer) as she's turned down for tenure and frets over her very sickly Historian mother with her sister before getting picked up by Homeland Security and getting put in a van with Major Sergeant Wyatt Logan (Matt Santer). They're taken to the lab where special agent Denise Christopher (Sakina Jaffrey) and famed inventor guy/lab owner Connor Mason (Paterson Joseph) inform them that time travel is possible, Flynn has stolen the main machine (The Mothership) and they have to chase and capture him with the back-up prototype (The Lifeboat). Lucy has doubts that are assuaged, they figure out he's gone to the Hindenburg and then she, Logan, and Rufus Carlin (Malcolm Barrett), a coder on secret orders from Mason who's sent to be their pilot go to 1937 to chase Flynn. All that happens in the first 15 minutes. The episode slows down a little bit after that for banter and time travel rules (Mainly don't change anything and don't go anywhere you already exist) but keeps a brisk pace which helps paper over some clunky storytelling.
By the end of the pilot we have a basic template for the show going forward: Flynn goes somewhere in time to change history, the team follows him and tries to stop his plan, the plan is thwarted but Flynn escapes for another week and our heroes contend with any changes they've inadvertently caused, while the show's myth arc is slowly revealed. So yeah, Timeless is basically a procedural show except instead of the "case of the week", it's the "Significant Historical Event of the week". That's not a bad thing though. Even if most episodes follow the basic template laid out by the pilot, there's a lot of room in that template for some interesting storytelling. The various mysteries set up in the pilot (Mostly involving a possible future connection between Lucy and Flynn and the reason Rufus was sent along on the mission) are also promising and as long as the show isn't too cagey with its reveals should be enough to sustain interest when the novelty of going to different eras wears out and the budget for depicting those eras runs out (The Hindenburg effects in the pilot are cool but it'll probably be a while before we see something like that again). Additionally, the pilot suggests that the show is willing to alter actual historical events to a degree with legitimate ramifications for the character's personal histories, which has lots of cool possibilities if handled correctly. And while again, a lot of the show is utterly ridiculous, the tone of the show lands on the right side of utterly ridiculous, taking things seriously but with a light and fun tone.
Also helping keep Timeless on the right side of ridiculous are Abigail Spencer and Malcolm Barrett. Spencer is a tremendous actress and she brings a lot of depth to the character of Lucy to make her a compelling lead. She has a warmth and a humanity that makes it easy to feel the things she's feeling throughout the pilot, from the claustrophobic fear of her initial time travel journey to the sense of wonder when she lays eyes on 1937 New Jersey to the mix of relief, pain and confusing after surprising events happen late in the pilot. A show like this needs a strong lead to keep it grounded in some kind of emotional reality even as events get more and more ludicrous and Spencer is definitely the right person for the job. Meanwhile, Barrett is a delight as Rufus, taking the familiar "comic relief nerd" type and breathing new life into it, giving Rufus a nervous energy that feels both familiar and fresh. Rufus also works because he's reluctant about travelling through time for the obvious reason of it sucking to be a black man in basically all eras of American history. This, along with Lucy as the lead gives the show an organic way to look at the racial and gender issues of the time, and though the pilot lays it on a little thick in a scene where Rufus informs a racist Prison guard of all the things he wants the guard to live to see black people accomplish, it's still looking at issues worth exploring.
The one clear weak link of the Pilot is the character of Wyatt Logan. Matt Santer does a fine job with him, but he can't help the character from coming across as the "generic snarky handsome hero type" he's clearly written as. It's not that there's a problem with this kind of character, but nothing about Logan is that new or interesting. He's gonna do things like call Lucy "Ma'am" or "Professor" or try to save people even though they're not supposed to change anything. He has a troubled past and a dead wife to motivate his pain. He skates by on charm and a half-smile. All of this has been done before and done better than Timeless does it in the pilot. It's not awful but it is kind of boring and that's the thing Timeless can't afford to be. Who knows though? Maybe by the end of the season, Wyatt will turn out to be much more interesting than he initially seemed. That'd be cool. It'd also be nice to see more depth to the character of Flynn going forward. Goran Visnjic does well with what he's given but Flynn doesn't come off as much more than a moustache-twirling villain here and that won't be sustainable for long.
Look, Timeless is not going to be the next great Television drama. It's probably not going to inspire the kind of devotion and lavish critical attention a genre show like Battlestar Galactica or Lost got. And that's fine. It doesn't have to do those things. What Timeless is shaping up to be is a fun, dumb show that gets to play with big moments in history (press releases for the next few episodes are promising the Lincoln Assassination, Rat Pack-era Vegas, and Nazi Germany) while slowly spooling out it's mythology and mysteries to keep people hooked and giving Abigail Spencer a chance to do her thing and class up the joint. Which might not be everyone's thing but sounds pretty great to me. Is there a chance this show will either go wildly off the rails or take itself too seriously and become a boring slog? Yes, definitely. I'd be surprised if one of those things didn't happen. That being said, there's enough promise in this first episode to make it worth the risk that it'll become unwatchable down the line. So if you're looking for something fun and ridiculous to watch this fall, take a chance on Timeless. It's not going to rock your world or anything, but it should easily be worth your time (Yes, I'm ending this on a dumb pun).
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