The best TV series using multiple timelines right now

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Multiple timelines bring a powerful undercurrent to a TV show

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published 29 January 2025

The highly anticipated third season of Showtime's hit series "Yellowjackets," which will be released on Feb. 14, continues to employ a multiple-timeline format. One of the show's narratives is set in 1996, when a plane carrying a high school girls' soccer team crashes somewhere in the Canadian wilderness. As the stranded survivors struggle to endure in the forest, the show toggles to the present, where someone is trying to shake down survivors of the ordeal, including Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) and Misty (Christina Ricci).

Two completely separate casts form "one of the best ensembles of the season," said Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert. The star-studded lineup anchors "a tricky narrative tightrope," said The Ringer. But "Yellowjackets" is not the only ongoing series to utilize a true multiple-timeline format.

Netflix's anime take on the "Terminator" universe is set in both 1997, hours before an AI-triggered nuclear cataclysm known as Judgement Day, as well as in a grim, post-apocalyptic 2022. In the 1997 timeline, a Tokyo researcher named Malcolm (voiced by Ándre Holland in the English-language version) has created an artificial intelligence entity designed to prevent another AI model, Skynet, from destroying humanity. And in 2022, where the remaining humans are clustered in small settlements and hunted by Skynet's robot assassins, a soldier named Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno) is sent back to 1997 to kill Malcolm and prevent Judgement Day. The first season creates "a solid framework" that is "as much about very human choices as it is about spectacle," said The Hollywood Reporter. It was released Aug. 29, 2024, and a second season is now rumored to be in the works.

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Four women (including "Catastrophe" star Sharon Horgan) conspire to murder their sister's abusive husband in the Apple TV+ black comedy set in Ireland. In the first timeline, the sisters hatch one hapless plan after another to kill John Paul (Claes Bang). In the second timeline, set shortly after John Paul's demise, two insurance agents begin to suspect that his "accidental" death was nothing of the sort. The series is "superbly constructed, perfectly paced and brilliantly performed," said The Guardian. A second season of the show debuted on Nov. 13, 2024.

A standout in the recent glut of video game adaptations, Prime Video's sci-fi epic is anchored by Lucy (Ella Purnell), who sets off from her bunker in search of her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), after he is captured by raiders from the radioactive surface known as the Wasteland. In another timeline set 200 years in the past, we see how the company that built the bunkers, Vault-Tec, may have played a role in triggering the nuclear war. While the show "seems somewhat campy on the surface," it is the "characters and the storytelling that really go above and beyond," said IGN. Filming for the second season was set to begin in January but was interrupted by the Los Angeles wildfires.

Building on the success of Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" films, HBO Max's "Dune: Prophecy" is a prequel set 10,000 years before the events of the Villeneuve films. In one timeline, Valya Harkonnen (Jessica Barden) stages a takeover of a secretive order of women "truthsayers," which would later become the Bene Gesserit. Emily Watson plays Valya decades later, as her plans for installing a member of the order on the throne of an intergalactic imperium near fruition. The series "succeeds in placing us in a far-flung world of false saviors and near-intractable systems of power," said Paste Magazine. The first season premiered Nov. 17, 2024.

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David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.