How One Daring Sci-Fi Reboot Became the Best Time-Travel Show Ever
It's time to stop sleeping on this 2015 SyFy hit.
If you ask a connoisseur of arty science fiction cinema to name some of their favorite films, the 1995 Terry Gilliam film 12 Monkeys will invariably be mentioned in reverent tones. This is for good reason. The film 12 Monkeys is a brilliant thriller that borders on being a film more about the limits of the human mind than actual time travel.
But if you’re a sci-fi fan who likes a little less ambiguity in their time travel and more actual, you know, time-travel action, the truth is, the 2015-2018 SyFy Channel 12 Monkeys reboot is in many ways a more satisfying genre experience than the film from which it came. And 10 years after its debut, this series is better than ever.
While fans of the series probably already know this, one of the reasons that the 12 Monkeys series is so fantastic and different from the film is that it was originally not a 12 Monkeys reboot at all. Instead, the origins of this show can be found in an un-produced script co-written by Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett called Splinter. This eventually morphed into a 12 Monkeys “reimagining,” which at the time, was something SyFy had a good track record with: the 2003-2009 Battlestar Galactica “reimagining” is still considered one of the greatest sci-fi shows of all time.
Going into 12 Monkeys, the world-building around the basic time-travel tech (which is called Project Splinter) came from Matalas and Fickett’s original ideas and their love of time-travel narratives in general. From Looper to Back to the Future, the four seasons of 12 Monkeys incorporate a massive number of time-travel tropes and concepts. These tributes to the subgenre of time travel even resulted in Christopher Lloyd appearing as a recurring villain named Zalmon Shaw in Seasons 3 and 4 of the show. Indeed, the 12 Monkeys time travel cred ran so deep that in Season 3, Madeleine Stowe, famous for her role in the original 1995 film, appeared in the show, suggesting a kind of pseudo-multiverse in which one could imagine the other film existing in a different reality.
Emily Hampshire in 12 Monkeys. Don’t worry. She’ll become your favorite.
From excellent mystery boxes (who is the Witness? Where is Titan City?) to wonderful character dynamics (can time-crossed lovers Cole and Cassie work it out?) 12 Monkeys is a highly bingeable show that also starts out as a slow burn. While the first batches of episodes are heavily focused on the future-tense disease that wipes out much of humanity, the overall temporal tapestry of the show slowly gets bigger and bigger. In watching Season 1, you might not be able to imagine that by Season 4 the characters will splinter their way to 1940, 1987, the Old West, and even 1491 in Merry Old England.
Interestingly, unlike almost every single other time travel show ever made, the exponential growth of overlapping time travel revelations and paradoxes only serves to make the show explicable and clear, rather than less. Yes, there are several bootstrap paradoxes and even hidden nonlinear family members in this series, but because the characters are so well drawn, and their bonds so heartfelt, you buy every single big twist, no matter how outrageous.
The cast of 12 Monkeys in 2015: Kirk Acevedo, Barbara Sukowa, Aaron Stanford, Amanda Schull, Emily Hampshire, and Todd Stashwick.
The writing from Matalas should be praised here, and it's no wonder that after his success on Picard Season 3 in 2023, he’s now working for Marvel on the next Vision show. But part of what makes 12 Monkeys work is the fact that Matalas and company also got lucky with an incredible cast; from the ever-reliable Aaron Standford as unlikely hero James Cole to Amanda Schull as the unflappable Cassie, to Kirk Acevedo’s everyman take on Ramse, to the hilarious Emily Hampshire as Jennifer, to Todd Stashwick as anti-hero Deacon (“don't you forget about me!”), and the gravitas of Barbara Sukowa as Dr. Katirna Jones, this cast was stacked.
If you’ve never seen 12 Monkeys and you’re a fan of Matalas or any of these great performers, you owe it to yourself to start watching it right now. Ten years later, aspects of this series will feel scarily prescient, but also, oddly, not dated at all. Many streaming services will tell you that 12 Monkeys is “dark” and “dystopian.” But if you stick it out, what you’ll find is one of the most uplifting, hopeful, and romantic sci-fi shows of all time.
