Posts Tagged ‘NBC Timeless
Worth Your Valuable Time: NBC’s Timeless on Monday Nights
What: Timeless, a new show for the 2016 Fall season
Where: NBC, which used to be a popular tee-vee network back when I was a kid
When: Monday nights (or anytime on Amazon)
Why: A fun show reminiscent of 1980s adventure shows (complete with dim-witted action hunk!)
The first new show of the 2016 Fall season that I feel comfortable recommending is NBC’s Timeless. I only know two people who still have a television, so if you are either of them, check your local listings when this airs week-to-week. I watched the episode this morning on NBC’s website but it’s also available on Amazon. It’s a show that I’d actually be happy paying the season pass subscription for.
Timeless reminds me of Voyagers! and Time Cop with a little Man in the High Castle and Sliders. For those not lucky enough to remember the gorgeousness that was Jon-Erik Hexum, he was my first-ever crush…star of a time-travel show in the 1980s about fixing things that went wrong in the timeline. That’s what Voyagers! was all about, but mainly people tuned in for all the handsomeness. Time Cop was a movie with Jean-Claude van Damme, but it was also a tee-vee show that aired for just one season. It’s premise was similar to Voyagers!, in that the Time Cops had to go back in time to fix things that bad guys did to alter the time stream. Man in the High Castle is a current Amazon Prime show about alternate universes where history worked out differently…which is also the concept of Sliders, more or less. Suffice it to say, I appear to really enjoy shows about time travel and alternate histories and unapologetic handsomeness.
For a few years now, NBC has seemed like a very depressing network. I still watch a few shows, like Law & Order: SVU, but NBC is not the “Must See Tee-Vee” that I remember it being in the 80s and 90s. When I was a kid, there were a lot of adventure shows on NBC, in addition to funny comedies. Then in the 2000s, NBC started airing really bleak and depressing shows. Ain’t nobody got time for that. Bye, Phylicia (Rashad)!
It’s weird how many ’80s things are coming back right now, with even a reboot of Dynasty supposedly ordered for the CW network. Last tee-vee season, NBC also talked about rebooting Hart to Hart, but with two gay dudes as the detectives. I wish they had done that, because it would have been fun, but something happened and now they pretend like they never announced that show was coming. I wonder if these ’80s throwbacks are premonitions of history echoing itself…with Trump poised to win the current presidential election in the way that Reagan followed all those years of Carter’s malaise. The same forces that hungered for an end to depressing bleakness back then might be doing the same thing now, which would mean a Republican wins this election to set the country back on the right track. We’ll see in 34 days, won’t we?
But, back to Timeless. The show’s pretty much like Time Cop in that bad guys have stolen a ship (which I call “The Time Tickler”) and they are using it in a complicated, seasons-long scheme to do something to the timeline to either create a utopia or avert some disaster or maybe cause the apocalypse. The first episode involves shadowy agents using the Time Tickler to head back to 1937 to stop the Hindenburg from exploding on arrival in New Jersey. Their plan was to detonate a bomb and destroy the Hindenburg on its return flight to Germany instead…because apparently some very important people were going to be aboard on that return flight, as they were headed to the coronation of King George VI (Queen Elizabeth II’s father, who became king after his brother Edward VIII decided he’d rather sleep with some divorced woman than serve his people as his duty required). The Shadowmen seemingly wanted to kill people who would later be instrumental in the American war effort…and taking them out by exploding the Hindenburg on its way back to Europe was a way they thought they could do that. I’m guessing their larger intent was to prevent the Allies from winning the war, but I’m sure they’ll get to that later in the season(s). There is a whole lot of time to tickle, after all.
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