“Timeless,” a series about time travel that co- creator Eric Kripke said will tell history in a fresh and exciting way, premieres at 10 p.m. tonight on NBC.
“Timeless” follows an unlikely team consisting of a history professor (Abigail Spencer), a soldier (Matt Lanter) and a scientist (Malcolm Barrett) who use a prototype time machine to chase a mysterious criminal (Goran Visnjic) who has stolen a more advanced time machine and is intent on destroying America by changing the past.
The team members also must make every effort not to affect the past themselves.
Kripke described “Timeless” as “a really visceral, grounded attack on history and we don’t sugarcoat it.”
“Timeless’s” other creator was Shawn Ryan, who created the 2002-2008 FX crime drama “The Shield,” ranked by TV Guide in 2013 as the 50th greatest television series of all time.
Producers made a “very intentional, conscious decision” to include a black man (Barnett) and a woman among the time travelers, said Kripke, who created The CW’s “Supernatural,” U.S. television’s longest-running fantasy series.
“So much of history is the history of rich white dudes, yet, there’s so much untold history from a minority perspective, from a female perspective,” Kripke said.
The inclusion of a black and a woman among its time travelers will allow “Timeless” “to tell a really exciting and fresh history that isn’t dusty and isn’t a school lesson, but is violent and exciting and very current and allows us to frankly make commentary on issues that are really happening today,” Kripke said at the Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour.
Barrett’s character will “face all sorts of racism in the different periods that he’s at that will be specific to those particular periods,” Kripke said.
The Hindenburg disaster is the subject of tonight’s episode while next week’s episode deals with the Lincoln assassination. Topics on future episodes include Watergate, the first moon landing and the Battle of the Alamo.
Among planned stories, the earliest point in history “Timeless” will go back to is the 1750s for the French and Indian War, Ryan said. One rule the series has is to never go back to a time during the lifetimes of the team’s members, Kripke said.
“Timeless” will also deal with its characters’ lives, with Spencer’s character having “a really serious, epic loss” at the end of tonight’s episode, Ryan said.
“We’re going to deal with that, but in ways that we’re going to attach at the beginning and end of episodes and hopefully aren’t going to get in the way of people dropping in to enjoy the episode when they watch,” Ryan said.
