Timeless Creators Shawn Ryan and Eric Kripke Answer Burning Questions About Season 1

Timeless is back with its second episode tonight in which the team — history professor (Abigail Spencer as Lucy Preston), soldier (Matt Lanter as Wyatt Logan) and scientist (Malcolm Barrett as Rufus Carlin) — chase terrorist Garcia Flynn (Goran Višnjic) to the night of President Abraham Lincoln‘s assassination, where they’re horrified to learn that Flynn’s linked up with history’s most notorious assassin, John Wilkes Booth (guest star Kelly Blatz).

Flynn, of course, stole a time machine so he can return to critical events in America’s past in an effort to change history, which would change the present. But what is his plan? Lucy speculates that Flynn intends to send the fragile nation into chaos by making a bad thing worse, and a debate rages among the team: Should they alter history if it means changing it for the better?

“Right now we are in the mystery phase of the season but the more the story  unfolds, the more we will start to understand why Garcia Flynn is doing what he is doing, why he is picking those targets,” co-creator/executive producer Eric Kripe says. “There is another layer of truth about why he is picking those targets and that will be unveiled throughout the season.”

At a screening of tonight’s episode, Kripe and Timeless co-creator and executive producer Shawn Ryan talk about the difficulties of casting historic figures, what are the rules of time travel as they apply to their NBC series, and more.

Is it challenging to cast the well-known, real-life characters?

Eric: Yes. We are learning as much as the viewers are about what works and what doesn’t.

To give you an example, what we have found so far, and this rule may change, but when it is someone that the modern audience doesn’t have an immediate familiarity with, we can get away with it. Robert Todd Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth are perfect examples. Lincoln was possible because the gentleman who played him was a Lincoln impersonator. That’s his job. We flew him out from Illinois.

In the third episode, which takes place in Rat Pack Vegas, we have a scene that takes place in the Copa, where Frank Sinatra is singing and John F. Kennedy is in the audience. We found guys that were really close and they did great. But when we were watching, we realized the audience is way too familiar with what these guys actually looked like, and we want to live as a rule on our show that if you can’t put the real guy on the screen, don’t put him on, so we ended up using a lot of the angles over their shoulders and behind their heads.

Shawn: We actually got actual live Sinatra performances to play during the songs, so the songs sound amazingly realistic. But it is more impressionistic from behind and soft focus to sell someone who 85 percent looks like Sinatra.

Eric: So we can have Ian Fleming during World War II in a future episode, because no one knows what he looks like, and we can have Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett at the Alamo, but by the same respect, someone pitched me Marilyn Monroe and I said, “No way.”

What are your rules for time travel?

Shawn: I come from shows that have a fairly high degree of realism to them, and yet, if you talk to police officers about how long investigations actually take, and the way the system actually works, TV lies all the time. My shows, as much as anyone, we condense interrogations and investigations that in real life take six months to investigate and adjudicate, and we handle them in or two days of story time. Audiences don’t seem to mind it; they seem to appreciate the shortcuts.

What I’ve learned on this show is that audiences really give a damn about what your time travel rules are. This is a science, to my knowledge, that doesn’t actually exist in the physical universe, and yet, people are very certain what the rules are. I could ridicule that, but only to my show’s determinant. I have to respect that the audience cares.

What we talked about is keeping the rules simple and understandable. We don’t want to go deep into a rabbit hole like 12 Monkeys in terms of the time travel stuff. We want this show to be audience-friendly and easily understandable the way that Quantum Leap was easily understandable.

So there are some very basic rules: You can’t go back to a place where you’ve existed — either previously in life or where you’ve traveled back. There are no do-overs in our universe. Things might change along the way, but just the basic idea that the universe can’t handle two of you in a space at one time was important to us.

Also, once something has changed, they now live in a universe where those things have changed. The people who didn’t go back in time, aren’t aware of the change, so, for example, Lucy finds herself in a strange place because the people around her are living life, but don’t know there is an alternate version of reality.

Will you be jumping forward in time?

Shawn: We don’t have plans to. What is great about the episodes we are doing now is our production designer can look and see what Ford’s Theater looked like. We built that theater. That is an entire build that we did. We can go back in time and give you a super realistic look at what something looked like. We can’t tell you what the world is going to look like in 20 years. Ask me again in a potential Season 3 or 4 when we are struggling for stories, but for the moment, we are far more fascinated with the past than we are trying to predict the future.

Eric: We look at our show as a sweeping, historical adventure more than we do a sci-fi, time-travel show. The fun of going to historical periods and meeting famous historical people and having these romantic adventures within those time frames is a lot more appealing and relatable than some of the sci-fi aspects.

Timeless airs tonight at 10 p.m. ET/PT on NBC.