Timeless…NBC piece of art!!

When Timeless co-creator Shawn Ryan heard the news on a Saturday morning last May, he couldn’t believe it. “What the hell is going on? Are we being Punk’d?” he remembers thinking. Three days earlier, NBC had canceled his time-travel drama, but in an unprecedented move, the network switched course: Timeless would live to fight for ten more episodes.

“That is the right decision,” Ryan thought, “but how on earth did you come to it three days after you made the wrong decision?”When a network cancels a show, it usually dies then and there. Occasionally, another network or a streaming service might revive a show — as in the case of Community, Cougar Town, or The Killing — but networks never reverse course on their own decisions, much less in public, much less within the course of a few days.
With Timeless, NBC did, thanks to fans who had built a devoted community around the show (but didn’t necessarily watch it live on its first airing) and because of negotiations between NBC and Sony, which produces it. Meanwhile, the Timeless cast and crew went from mourning its end to celebrating a new beginning. Before the series returns on March 11, Vulture spoke with creators, cast, and TV executives about this once-in-a-lifetime Timeless experience.