time travel tv series 2023

Netflix Just Quietly Dropped The Best Time-Travel Show of 2023

“Know you are loved.”

Netflix has made a name for itself in mind-bending science fiction. Between Stranger Things , Dark , The OA , and Sense8 , the streamer keeps finding new and exciting ways to shape how we think about the world. Usually, these new shows are met with a big fanfare, an even bigger marketing campaign, and, in the case of Stranger Things , a tie-in ice cream.

But recently, Netflix dropped a series that more than deserves to stand next to these tentpoles: a graphic novel adaptation that takes a fresh approach to one of the oldest genres and adds a huge time-travel element that changes everything.

Bodies, based on the graphic novel of the same name by Si Spencer, emerges from a simple concept: four detectives from four different points in time all find a strange body on the ground. It’s naked, missing its left eye, and there’s no trace of any bullets found in it. In 2023, Muslim detective Shahara Hasan (Amaka Okafor) tries to stop what she thinks is a terrorist plot. In 1941, Detective Charles Whiteman (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) deals with antisemitism while investigating a death that couldn’t have come from a bomb. In 1890, Detective Alfred Hillinghead (Kyle Soller) gets caught up with a journalist and a strange society. Finally, in 2053, Detective Iris Maplewood (Shira Haas) finds the same body... alive.

It’s a complicated premise, but Bodies expertly weaves four different mysteries on top of each other. A strange boy discovered in 2023 informs a strange man in 1941. A message scrawled into a wall in 1890 is still there in 2053. While there are four different investigations, there’s only one big mystery, and every character has a role in it.

The climax of the story happens in 2023, meaning when we first take a peek into 2053, we know what will happen in the “present.” Bodies , though initially a straightforward whodunit, quickly becomes a hard sci-fi story about time loops, quantum physics, and quite literally changing history. It all circles around one phrase told to each detective in their respective times: “Know you are loved.”

Four different detectives find the same body in four different eras.

Apart from its time-travel element, Bodies is simultaneously a period piece, police procedural, dystopia, conspiracy thriller, family drama, and cult story. It’s a lot for any series to attempt, but Bodies is able to incorporate each through its divided plot. When the action jumps from era to era, the tone is effectively reset. One scene may be a gripping chase scene between Hasan and a suspect, but then it will cut immediately to Whiteman in 1941 bonding with a little girl.

Bodies is a stealth time-travel show. The science fiction elements are added so gradually that it’s hard to even notice until the last episode where events are changed and characters even embrace their future selves. It’s a testament to the all-star cast to balance the tones so excellently: it could be tempting to shift from “detective show acting” to “science fiction acting” but everything is played with the utmost seriousness.

Detective Shahara Hasan (Amaka Okafor) appears in the 2023 and 2053 eras.

Maybe this is why this series isn’t getting the same acclaim as its spiritual successors: calling it a time-travel show betrays the shift of the series altogether. But this show should be on the watchlist of every sci-fi fan, whether they’re the kind who misses the grandfather paradoxes of Dark or the political commentary of Stranger Things .

Bodies is now streaming on Netflix.

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Rising British star Paapa Essiedu, who earned an Emmy nomination for “I May Destroy You,” takes the time-traveling route in “The Lazarus Project” on TNT.

Essiedu plays George, who wakes up one morning to find that he’s seemingly repeating a day that happened six months ago yet nobody else seems to notice. He thinks he’s losing his grip on reality until he learns about a top-secret international organization called The Lazarus Project that uses time travel to stop mass-extinction events.

(He’s told that the world has already ended several times, including once in the ’60s when Russia and America launched nuclear warheads at each other — but The Lazarus Project was able to undo it). 

Essiedu, 32, said he enjoys series in which time travel plays a main role.

“I loved ‘Russian Doll.’ I haven’t watched the second [season] yet but I thought the first one was brilliant,” he told The Post. 

“‘Back to the Future’ is a classic. I think this show [‘The Lazarus Project’]  pulls on strands of all of that, and tries to create something that feels unique. There are sci-fi elements, romance, action, thriller, comedy.

“All of it.”

The Lazarus Project,” which first aired on the UK’s Sky Max in 2022, has already filmed a second season. 

“I think George is a really relatable guy. He’s a very normal dude,” Essiedu said. “It’s crazy what he goes through. But he’s almost an everyman. He works in tech, he enjoys watching football, he’s got a girlfriend. He’s someone who is not prepared for this extraordinary situation, and has to improvise or adapt to reach the levels required of that world.

“I think what’s exciting about the show is … in the film of our lives, we’re all quite ordinary people. But weird sh–t happens all the time. How do we cope with it?”

Essiedu said that he was able to relate to George because in his own life, he’s experienced situations where he’s felt like a fish out of water. 

“I remember when I went to drama school when I was 19, I never really went to the theater. I had never seen a Shakespeare play, I had never been around people who cared about Chekhov or Stanislavski or whatever,” he said. “And suddenly I found myself in this institution where that’s all anyone talked about all day. I felt like the odd one out. 

“But you adapt and stretch yourself to be able to meet the demands of the space,” he said. “I think that’s what George does well. But I also relate to his questioning of the environment that he’s in. He doesn’t just turn up and people tell him what to do and he just does it. He asks questions.” 

Essiedu also has a lot of other projects in the pipeline, including a role in the hotly anticipated sixth season of “Black Mirror.” (“Absolutely not,” he said, when asked if he can share anything about that.) He’s currently in rehearsal for the play “The Effect” at the National Theater in London, he’s co-starring in the film “The Outrun” with Saoirse Ronan and he’s also co-starring with Melissa McCarthy in a Christmas movie from Richard Curtis.

“I just did a comedy,” he said, referring to his movie with Melissa McCarthy. 

“And that was so different to the things I had been doing before that. But it was so nourishing for me as an artist. I try not to pigeonhole myself, or do the same thing twice. I’ve been busy.  

“I’m grateful for all the opportunities I’ve been given, and I don’t take them for granted,” he said. “I want to continue exploring different types of stories and characters.” 

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Way Home’ On Hallmark Channel, About A Family In Conflict, Time Travel, And Finding Out About Past Tragedies

Where to Stream:

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• Andie MacDowell

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Shows where a character can go back and forth in time tend to have their own set of rules, like what happens in both timelines during the character’s time travel, and how their presence in the past affects the present. The more thought-out those rules can be, the better it is for the storytelling, since viewers aren’t distracted by trying to figure out the disruptions in the space-time continuum. A new Hallmark series does involve time travel, but it’s just as much about mending family rifts than anything else.

THE WAY HOME : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “Port Haven, New Brunswick, 1814.” A woman is chased through the woods, with people shouting that she’s a witch. Out of desperation, she dives into a small pond and disappears.

The Gist: Present day Minneapolis. Fifteen-year-old Alice Dhawan (Sadie Laflamme-Snow) is about to play during a school talent show, but is dismayed when she walks out on stage and sees her dad Brady (Al Mukadam) staring at his phone and her mother, Kat Landry (Chyler Leigh), isn’t there at all. She storms off stage and pulls the fire alarm to distract everyone.

Kat shows up and is told that this incident is the last straw, and that Alice is going to be expelled. Brady and Kat have been together since they were teenagers, but they’ve recently separated; he tells Kat that his current girlfriend is moving in. Kat’s terrible day is compounded by the fact that she just got laid off from her job.

But when she gets a letter from her mom, Del Landry (Andie MacDowell), telling her to come home to Port Haven, Kat sees this as a way to get a fresh start. She hasn’t been there in 20 years, and has barely spoken to Del that whole time. Alice isn’t exactly in favor of the move, either, and snarks her way through her first few days there.

Del is happy to meet her granddaughter, but is still pretty cold towards Kat. It turns out that yes, that letter was written by Del, but she never sent it, and she wonders who did. Things just haven’t been the same since Kat’s 9-year-old brother Jacob disappeared in 1999; her father, Colton (Jefferson Brown), died the next year. The house used to be full of music and good times. Now all Del wants to do is finally get on with her life, which is why she’s taken down pics of both her son and husband.

There are some upsides to being back; Kat reconnects with her childhood bestie, Elliot Augustine (Evan Williams), who has also returned to town after a divorce. Elliot is a teacher at Alice’s school, and tells her to come to him for help, no matter when it is. But as conflict among the Landry women escalates, Alice takes a pendant from her mom and throws it into the pond on their property. She jumps in for it, but is caught by some vines.

When she’s pulled up, she’s surprised to see a teenage girl who says she’s on their family property. When she introduces herself as Kat (Alex Hook), Alice realizes she’s looking at the teenage version of her mother. Back at the house, Colton and Jacob are still alive, Del is wearing a sun dress and dancing, and the calendar says 1999. She enjoys dinner with the Landrys, and meets teenage Elliot (David Webster), who is in the barn to set up a telescope. She tells him who she really is, taking future Elliot up on his offer, which is why, in 2023, Elliot is able to reassure a worried adult Kat that Alice will be back.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Way Home feels like a gentle, Hallmark-ified take on a time travel series like the second season of Russian Doll , where there are rules to going back and forth in time. So let’s say  Russian Doll  season 2 combined with  Virgin River .

Our Take: We actually had to go a couple of episodes deep while watching  The Way Home . We were wondering how creators Alexandra Clarke, Heather Conkie and Marly Reed were going to handle the time-travel conceit.

The Way Home does a pretty good job of setting down those rules we mentioned above in those first two episodes, courtesy of Elliot, who isn’t quite sure how the pond works, but is the only one in both timeframes besides Alice who knows what’s what. For instance, the pond doesn’t send Alice back to 1999 until she needs to go, and time spent there also elapses in the present.

But the main thing that seems to tightly tie the two timeframes together is that Kat remembers being friends with this new girl in town named Alice that summer that Jacob disappeared; it’s why she gave her daughter that name. Little does Kat know that she named her kid after… well, after her kid. Because Alice was only around that summer, memories of what she looked like are a bit muddied, which is why neither Kat nor Del can make the connection; Alice is blurry in the one photo of them together back then.

Because that part of the story seems to be pretty well thought out, then the show comes down to the story of what the Landrys went through in 1999 and 2000 and how Del and Kat deal with it now. We appreciate that there are no easy answers between mother and daughter, and having the two of them back together after so much time apart doesn’t automatically make things better again. Both MacDowell and Leigh play this conflict well; there is a feeling that they both want to make this work, but just can’t because of the dual tragedies they suffered and the decades of estrangement.

It’s definitely going to be Alice’s job to mend things, as she goes between 1999 and now and truly finds out what happened to her uncle and grandfather. How she deals with the emotions of seeing how her family used to be versus how they are now will be the key to the show, and Laflamme-Snow also does a good job of conveying the layers of confusion that she has to cut through in order to use the time travel to her advantage.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Elliot, knowing things that Kat doesn’t, assures her that Alice will come home at some point. This is after we see Alice go to teenage Elliot for help.

Sleeper Star: Samora Smallwood plays Monica Hill, who owns the local cafe and was Kat’s biggest nemesis in high school. She’s only in one scene in the first couple of episodes, but she makes an impact in that scene.

Most Pilot-y Line: For some reason, word got up to the kids at Alice’s new school that she set fire to the building, and she’s made fun of for it. How those rumors traveled from Minnesota to New Brunswick is anyone’s guess. And it seems that part gets dropped pretty quickly.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Solid performances, a pretty well-thought-out time travel concept, and an avoidance of schmaltz makes  The Way Home a good show to watch with your family.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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