Time travel is one of the trickiest tools a writer can pick up. It's a genre that demands discipline. Every rule you set has to be followed. Get it wrong, and you end up with a tangled mess of plot holes that fans will spend years picking apart. When it comes to movies, filmmakers have gotten it right more times than you can count. Back to the Future basically wrote the rulebook. Then there's Terminator, Primer, Predestination, Edge of Tomorrow, Avengers: Endgame, Hot Tub Time Machine — the list goes on.
Television, however, is a different story. Building a series around time travel is an entirely different challenge because writers have to keep their rules consistent across dozens of episodes and multiple seasons. It's no surprise, then, that there are far fewer great time travel shows than movies. The ones that do succeed, though, are some of the smartest and most ambitious sci-fi stories ever made. Here are the greatest sci-fi series that deal with time travel.
'Continuum' (2012–2015)
Continuum follows Kiera Cameron (Rachel Nichols), a cop from the year 2077, where the world is run by a corporate governing body called the Corporate Congress. When a group of terrorists known as Liber8 get sent back in time to escape execution, Kiera gets dragged along and ends up stranded in 2012 Vancouver. With no way home and no backup, she teams up with a local detective and hunts down the Liber8 members one by one, all while hiding her true origin.
What makes Continuum so compelling is that it never lets you fully root for either side. Kiera is fighting to protect a future that is, by almost every measure, a dystopia, and the terrorists she's chasing genuinely believe they're stopping that future from happening. As the show goes on, Kiera slowly realizes that every choice she makes to get home might be reshaping the very future she's trying to save. It's a show that trusts its audience to keep up, and it rewards that trust with one of the most underrated sci-fi mysteries of the 2010s.
'The Lazarus Project' (2022–2023)
Paapa Essiedu stars as George, an ordinary app developer whose life gets turned upside down when he suddenly wakes up six months in the past. At first, it plays like a Groundhog Day setup, but the show quickly reveals what's really going on. George gets recruited by the Lazarus Project, a covert agency with the power to roll back time to the most recent checkpoint whenever humanity is on the brink of annihilation.
There's one catch: they can only rewind time to the most recent July 1, which means every reset forces them to relive months of their lives from scratch. Things become even more complicated when George's wife dies in a tragic accident. Refusing to accept her fate, he breaks the agency's most important rule and manipulates events to trigger a time reset, setting off a chain reaction that threatens both the organization and reality itself.
'The Flash' (2014–2023)
When Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) was 11, he watched a yellow blur kill his mother, alongside a mysterious red blur he couldn't explain. His father gets wrongfully convicted for the murder, and that injustice pushes Barry to become a crime scene investigator determined to clear his dad's name. Then, a freak particle accelerator explosion gives Barry superhuman speed and unleashes metahumans across Central City, and Barry starts using his powers to protect the city as the Flash.
But once he runs fast enough to break the speed of light, he discovers he can travel through time, and that's when the show really finds its identity. The first season is a genuinely great murder mystery built around uncovering the identity of the man in the yellow suit and how Barry's mom actually died. From there, the later seasons go all in on time travel mechanics: alternate timelines, time paradoxes, time remnants — it's all here. If you're a fan of superheroes and time travel in equal measure, The Flash should be at the top of your watchlist, even if the later seasons eventually go miserably off the rails.
'Steins;Gate' (2014)
Steins;Gate follows a group of amateur scientists who modify a microwave and accidentally turn it into a device that can text messages into the past. They call them D-Mails, short for DeLorean Mails (if you're reading a list of the best time travel shows, you should get that reference). The series has a ton of fun with the concept. For example, early on, the group sends one of themselves the winning lottery numbers, and she buys the ticket in the past. In the present, she suddenly becomes incredibly wealthy, and her entire personality changes in an instant.
But the fun doesn't last long. The group's experiments soon attract the attention of SERN, a shadowy organization that has already been experimenting with time travel and has left behind a trail of gelatinized corpses stranded across time from failed attempts. Once SERN figures out that a group of college kids has cracked the one thing their entire organization has been chasing, they begin hunting them down, and what began as a quirky sci-fi comedy gradually turns into one of the most emotionally devastating time travel stories ever told.
'Dark' (2017–2020)
This is undoubtedly the definitive time travel show on TV so far. Dark opens with a voiceover stating that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion, and then it wastes no time proving it. On June 21, 2019, Michael Kahnwald (Sebastian Rudolph) hangs himself and leaves behind a sealed letter with one strict instruction: "Do not open before November 4, 10:13 p.m." You flash forward a few months later, and the town of Winden is on edge after a local teenager goes missing. Then the police discover a young boy's body that appears to have been dead for months — but the boy was seen alive just days earlier.
What follows is a mind-bending, multi-generational saga that weaves together four families across three time periods (2019, 1987, and 1953) and eventually expands to include 1888 and 2052. The show's intricate plotting and philosophical depth make it a must-watch for any serious sci-fi fan. If you haven't seen it yet, Dark is a masterpiece that will leave you questioning the nature of time itself.
'Loki' (2021–2023)
Marvel's Loki takes the God of Mischief (Tom Hiddleston) out of the main MCU timeline and drops him into the Time Variance Authority (TVA), a bureaucratic organization that monitors the timeline and prunes any branch that deviates from the sacred timeline. Loki, who escaped his fate in Avengers: Endgame, is forced to help the TVA fix a series of temporal anomalies caused by his own variants.
The show is a brilliant blend of sci-fi, crime procedural, and character study. It explores themes of free will, destiny, and identity, all while delivering some of the most visually stunning time travel sequences on TV. The chemistry between Loki and his female variant Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) is electric, and the season one finale's revelation about the true nature of the TVA is a game-changer for the entire MCU. Loki is a must-watch for any fan of time travel or the Marvel universe.
'12 Monkeys' (2015–2018)
Based on the 1995 film of the same name, 12 Monkeys follows James Cole (Aaron Stanford), a man sent back in time from a plague-ravaged future to stop the release of a deadly virus. But as he digs deeper, he discovers that the past, present, and future are all connected in ways he never imagined, and that the line between hero and villain is blurred.
The show is a masterclass in complex storytelling, with a plot that twists and turns across multiple timelines and characters who are not always what they seem. It's a show that rewards careful viewing and has a satisfying, emotionally resonant ending that ties everything together. If you're looking for a time travel show that will keep you guessing until the very end, 12 Monkeys is a hidden gem.
'Rick and Morty' (2013–present)
While not strictly a time travel show, Rick and Morty has used time travel in some of its most memorable episodes. The animated sitcom follows the misadventures of an eccentric, alcoholic scientist Rick Sanchez and his good-hearted but easily influenced grandson Morty. The show's use of time travel is often satirical, poking fun at the tropes of the genre while also delivering genuinely clever and thought-provoking stories.
Episodes like "A Rickle in Time" and "The Rickshank Redemption" explore the consequences of time travel in ways that are both hilarious and mind-bending. The show's willingness to take risks and its sharp writing have made it one of the most beloved animated series of the past decade. For a lighter take on time travel that doesn't skimp on the sci-fi, Rick and Morty is a perfect choice.
These eight shows prove that time travel on television can be just as compelling, if not more so, than in movies. Whether you're in the mood for a dark, philosophical drama or a comedic adventure, there's a time travel series here for you. And if you're looking for more great TV, check out our list of the most rewatchable sitcoms or dive into mystery masterpieces that rewrote the genre's rulebook.
