‘11.22.63’ & Other TV Shows About Altering History, Ranked

Similarities to the 1944 film It Happened Tomorrow apparently unintended, this fun series featured a fresh-faced Kyle Chandler as a stockbroker who mysteriously receives each issue of the Chicago Sun-Times a day early. He chooses to use his future knowledge for good… which can’t be said for everyone in his orbit.

As the Terminator franchise floundered on the big screen, it was this TV series that offered a compelling continuation of the T2 storyline. A pre-Game of Thrones Lena Headey shone as the title character, a mother trying to protect her son and all of humanity, with allies and enemies arriving from the future.

A fan favorite brought back from cancellation twice, Timeless tracks a scientist, a soldier, and a history professor as they pursue a terrorist through the centuries, trying to stop him from remaking the world through changes to the past. And the drama literally ignites with a Hindenburg plot in the pilot episode.

Preventing John F. Kennedy’s assassination is a frequent mission for time travelers in fiction (as is killing Adolf Hitler). And in this twisty thriller that lives up to King’s source material, Franco’s Jake Epping realizes that saving JFK might mean dooming many other Americans, including one to whom he has become quite attached.

The project of this TV show’s title is a secret organization that reverts time to an earlier point to prevent world-threatening events. We encounter this premise through the perspective of George (Paapa Essiedu), who soon has to decide between a personal loss and an apocalyptic threat in a philosophical but propulsive storyline.

The premise of this series already had us hooked: A woman gets visions of her late father and gets an inkling that she may be able to bend spacetime to her will to undo his death. But add stunning visuals featuring rotoscoped animation — 2D animation crafted from live-action footage — and we’re completely undone.

Just like the 1995 film on which it’s based, 12 Monkeys follows a future time-traveler who arrives in the present day to prevent a shadowy organization from unleashing a virus that would decimate humanity. It’s a TV show that gets better with each season, and stay tuned for a cameo from one of the film’s stars.

Imagine Groundhog Day with less romance and more mystery and more Final Destination-like demises, and you have Russian Doll. The darkly funny series stars Natasha Lyonne as an accident-prone woman trying to break out of a time loop, as every one of her many deaths resets her timeline.

A sci-fi classic that deserved better than the non-finale it got, Quantum Leap starred Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett, a man who leaps into the consciousnesses of various figures throughout history. One of those figures is Lee Harvey Oswald, as Bakula’s character also tries to save JFK.

This German-language series is not for the casual viewer; in fact, it’s not even for the most ardent sci-fi fan. The disappearance of children from a German community exposes family secrets buried even deeper than the wormhole in the caves beneath the town. With a storyline covering three timeframes and multiple actors playing each character, Dark is a challenging but rewarding watch.