2002’s failed pilot for The Time Tunnel offered a darker twist on the original ’60s series and could have turned into an excellent science fiction entry.
[Updated]
What Is It?
This 2002 pilot was a remake of the Irwin Allen series that ran for one season in the late sixties, and like the Sci Fi Channel’s reboot of Battlestar: Galactica which would bow a year later, the new Time Tunnel had a darker, grittier feel than the campy original. The pilot establishes that an experiment with “hot fusion” created a “time storm” that swept through the past for a duration of 240 minutes and has changed the time stream. In the altered present, we see such minor to more significant changes as red and green being switched on traffic lights, the U.S. having only 49 states, and the Russians having won the race to the moon. A team is assembled to go back into the past wherever the time storm currently resides and undo changes that have been detected.
Aired: Never Aired
Developed By: Kevin Burns, Jon Jashni
Starring: David Conrad, Dion Luther, Andrea Roth, Tawny Cypress
Why Didn’t it Fly?
FOX passed on the series, allegedly because they decided to greenlight some other science fiction show titled Firefly. But then seeing the fate of that one, there’s a good chance the Time Tunnel would not have survived past its first season either. The same creative staff later worked with the Sci Fi Channel during the 2005-06 timeframe in a second attempt to reboot the property, but that never made it past the script stage (IMDb.com incorrectly lists the 2002 pilot with a 2006 date, apparently linking it to the later efforts to bring back the show).
Would the Series have Worked?
This pilot establishes a much more interesting twist on the original premise and delivers a pretty good science fiction story as well. It rushes past most of the exposition expected from an intro episode and fills in the blanks on the fly, which is a good approach. It also throws in some poignant moments with the lead characters interacting with people in the past and having to make hard decisions not to further impact the time stream. And even though it sets up an ongoing series, the episode can stand by itself as an excellent genre tale. A conspiracy element is introduced early on as well, but the pilot did not appear to be taking the approach of setting up a serialized story that would layer mystery upon mystery (which would become expected from sci fi shows after Lost became an unexpected hit in 2004). It looked more like the series would follow an episodic format that would have been linked together by a background story arc, similar to the early approach of The X-Files, and this one certainly had the potential to turn into an excellent series.
As with pretty much any movie or TV series dealing with time travel, it does break some of its own temporal rules (“Whatever you do, when you go back in time, don’t change that“. And the first thing they do is change that). But not to the same extant as some of the sloppier productions in this sub-genre (show titles withheld to protect the guilty). Time travel has always presented plenty of challenges to writers and this pilot seems to handle those better than most.
Where Can You Watch It?
The pilot episode is available as an extra from the second volume of the original series DVD set, and you can also catch it at YouTube (though the video quality is not great). I highly recommend checking it out because this is a great start to what could have been a classic sci fi series if given the chance, and it also stands up well on its own.
Read about more Sci Fi TV pilots that did not fly at this link.
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I’ve just seen this crap and I am being extremely polite whe I call it crap. Thank God this was not unleashed on the public.
“I’ve just seen this crap and I am being extremely polite whe I call it crap. Thank God this was not unleashed on the public.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!
Yeah, that too. (AGREE 100%. I was being polite before.)
“Campy”
WHERE????????? “VOYAGE” got idiotic that season, and “LOST IN SPACE” became a comedy– albeit, from my current perspective, with FAR-better writing than “VOYAGE” had the same year despite its often blatent surface silliness. NO, REALLY. “THE TIME TUNNEL” was the best damned thing Irwin Allen was doing that season.
“a much more interesting twist on the original premise”
I don’t think so. I do feel like the 2002 film could have stood on its own as an interesting science-fiction movie, but NOT as a remake of a classic TV series that never should have been cancelled after only one year. “TT” and “THE GREEN HORNET” were both up againt not one but TWO highly-rated series on the other networks, and if the IDIOTS at ABC had any sense at all, they would have moved them to a different day after the first 13 weeks.
“THE TIME TUNNEL” imbedded itself so deeply into my brain, that despite ABC never re-running the pilot (despite what some mis-informed people have said online), and my not seeing it since September 1966, when I watched the DVD last year, my memory of it was SO clear, SO vivid– it was as though I’d just seen it one week before. It was a really SPOOKY experience.
When reading this, I remembered the 2015 film “Parallels”, a nice little Netflix sci-fi film about alternate dimensions etc., and there were originally some plans to turn this into a Fox TV series called “The Building”. Never happened, though. Maybe the film was supposed to be the pilot, and when it didn’t get picked up, they just shoved it to Netflix instead. (?)
Parallels was intended as a pilot (or at least to continue with more movies), but was never picked up (watch for an upcoming post). It was a really good sci fi entry, though, and is definitely worth revisiting.
Per the comment, “(IMDb.com incorrectly lists the 2002 pilot with a 2006 date, apparently linking it to the later efforts to bring back the show).”
I thought so too, and went into IMDB to make a correction. But IMDB has certain rules you must follow, and in this case, when you open up the details of the date, it is actually tied to the date when the movie was included on the original series DVD release. Unfortunately, because there is no “air date” for the 2002 movie, we’re stuck with the 2006 date for when the unaired pilot was released on DVD.