10 Greatest Time Travel TV Shows Of All Time
They're the flavor of the week, but which ones stand the test of time?
It's a weird quirk of the entertainment industry that certain types of shows and films tend to come all bunched together. You get things like Deep Impact and Armageddon somehow coming out in the same year, two completely unrelated Alexander the Great biopics, and this year's bizarre fascination with time travel shows.
Sure, television incorporates some level of wish fulfillment, and there are a lot of people out there who wish that they could travel through time (say, for example, to prevent certain events in early November 2016 from happening). But there's no way the networks could have known the world we would be living in, and how badly we would want to escape it, when they were first optioning these projects.
Yet here we are: awaiting the apocalypse and up to our necks in time travel shows. So it seems as good a time as any (pun absolutely intended) to sift through television's time travel shows and really separate the wheat from the chaff. Because as fascinating as these kinds of shows can be, they are most decidedly not created equal.
There's no way to sugar coat it: there are some shining gems, and some truly astonishing pieces of absolute garbage. But when it works, it really really works.
10. Journeyman
Journeyman has a bit of The Time Traveler's Wife to it, as a happily married man is forced to deal with the inconvenience of being occasionally jettisoned through time to fix other people's problems. It explores the experience of an unwilling time traveler, but not one who is sucked into a different historical period and has to just sort of make do (as we often see in these types of shows), but a character who is routinely returned to his own time and has to make excuses for his frequent absences to those he cares about.
In a lot of time travel shows, it seems like the characters are either returned to the moment they left, making the trip more or less instantaneous to an outside observer, or the idea that the characters might be missed is barely remarked upon. The practical result of this decision made by Journeyman is that time travel forces the main character to confront his own abandonment issues, which is a really interesting take on the well-worn subgenre.