I stumbled upon this show on Netflix. As you can probably tell from the name it’s a show about time travel. It started out a bit slow but it inexorably pulled me in. The show is so good that I almost didn’t even notice the other extraordinary thing about it, the diversity of the cast. The billionaire scientist who invents the time machine is a Black man. So is his lead scientist. Two of the other scientists are women, one of them a woman of color. The lead historian and the one in charge of the missions is a woman. The government official in charge of the operation is a woman of color. As a matter of fact the only white guy on the good guy team is the muscle.
But that’s not even the most unusual aspect of this show. The agent in charge isn’t the Indian woman in charge. The female scientist is not the female scientist of color. The lead historian is not the female lead historian. The Black male scientist is not the Black male scientist. Unlike on a lot of shows the women and people of color of Timeless are people first. Complex, fully realized people whose gender and/or ethnicity is part of who they are but not all of who they are.
If you don’t understand why this is a big deal, you are probably a white guy. No offense. Things are better now but when I was coming up (white) women were the wife/girlfriend. Often murdered to advance the story of the straight white hero. There was the (soon to be dead) good Black guy or bad Black guy gangsta. Black women were angry maids. Asian guys were smart geeks, Asian women were sexy and/or submissive. There was the fiery Latina best friend. The suicidal gay person. And native people were rarely seen at all. Hell, when I was young Hollywood was still stereotyping Italians as mobsters and the Irish as drunk fighters.
It started to change in my teens and twenties but the Black films of the era still tended to be about slaves and/or poverty in the hood. The films staring PoC were always about being OTHER. The best roles for PoC were those not originally written for PoC. Which means that the actors got to play more than just their ethnicity, but also that ethnicity was also rarely explored at all.
Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon, for example, wasn’t written with a particular ethnicity in mind. In Hollywood this usually defaults to white. The director, Richard Donner is quoted from a 1987 press conference for the movie in an article by Mental Floss. He says that, “We just got the best actor that we could for the part, and it happened to be he was black.” But in an interview with Empire, the article goes on to say, Donner explained that it was casting director Marion Dougherty who suggested Glover. “She said to me, ‘Did you see The Color Purple? What about Danny Glover?’ And my first reaction was, ‘But he’s black!’ And then I thought, ‘Whoa, f*ck, here’s Mr. Liberal. What a brilliant idea…’ I felt stupid. It changed my way of thinking.” The result is one of the best action films of the 80s. I would argue a top ten for the twentieth century. But one thing it does not do is examine in any way what it was like for Murtaugh to be a Black cop in LA.
In Timeless when the Black billionaire tells his Black top scientist that he must join the crew because he is the only one who can pilot the time machine the scientist’s first reaction is vehement no. He feels that, as a Black man, there is no place in American history for him. Throughout their travels through American history the three encounter circumstances in which they have to deal with racism and sexism in ways that are downright dangerous.
Each episode is like a mini-history lesson on things not found in a standard text, but in the most fun way possible. Though the travelers encounter major historical figures they are rarely the focus of the episode. Instead of JFK an episode focuses on his mistress. Katherine Johnson of Hidden Figures fame gets her own episode. My favorite episode so far is the Jesse James one about Bass Reeves, the man thought most likely to have inspired the creation of the Lone Ranger.* As I mentioned above social issues like racism, sexism, and others are highlighted throughout the series making lots of opportunities for families to start discussions about both the past and the present.
Bass Reeves was born into slavery before fleeing into the territory now known as Oklahoma. Then it was ruled by five Native American tribes: Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw. He stayed there for years learning both the language and customs of the Seminole and Creek tribes. Once freed by the 13th Amendment he returned to his home in Arkansas, married and had eleven children. For a decade he lived the life domestic before being recruited as a Deputy Marshal by Marshal James Fagan.
Often working with deputy Marshal Grant Johnson, a mixed race Creek freedman, Bass Reeves would go on to arrest more than 3,000 people and kill 14 outlaws, all without sustaining a single bullet wound. Reeves lost his position in 1907, when Oklahoma gained statehood and the laws of the new state banned African-American from working as deputy marshals. More on Bass Reeves. More on Grant Johnson.