By Jonathan Klotz
| Updated
Before streaming changed Hollywood forever, syndication was the big money maker, allowing studios to lease out their shows for an easy profit. First-run syndication shows could be huge money makers, with Baywatch being the most successful show of the 90s, which is an example of a syndicated hit.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have Time Trax, an Australian sci-fi series that played out like a poor man’s Quantum Leap, and despite some creative ideas, it failed to hold onto an audience and is now in danger of vanishing forever.
Hunting The Criminals Of The Future Today
The Quantum Leap comparison is one that Time Trax was slammed with even during its original run from 1993 to 1994, and if you hear the show’s synopsis, you’ll immediately start nodding along and think, “Yup, that makes sense.” In Time Trax, criminals from the year 2193 use a time machine called a Trax to go back to the past of a parallel universe. Police Captain Darren Lambert, played by Dale Midkiff, whom you might recognize from Pet Semetary, or more recently, his appearances on every police procedural you can think of, goes off in pursuit, aided by SELMA (Specified Encapsulated Limitless Memory Archive), his version of Al, and he can’t return until all of them have been apprehended.
What Time Trax did differently is to make all of the future humans superior, ranging from higher IQs and rapid memorization to the ability to move faster and, in what was frequently the best shots of the series, a way to perceive time faster, giving the appearance of slowing down time around them. Darren relied on SELMA to find the fugitives by tracking their heartbeats, which beat slower than humans in the present, as low as 35 BPM on average.
Knew Exactly What It Was
With a “case of the week” format, Time Trax didn’t try to reinvent a genre like Babylon 5, one of the other Prime Time Entertainment Network originals, with Kung-Fu: The Legend Continues rounding out the syndicated trio; instead, it was a fun, breezy series. The show had some initial success, earning a second season, and it could have kept going for longer, but the network wanted to rework, canceling the series in the process.
Time Trax may be filled with awkward dialogue, cheap special effects, and sets that are reused over and over due to budget issues, but it was also delightfully charming in the same way as other 90s syndicated hits like Hercules and Xena. There are a few guest stars that are familiar to Star Trek fans as well, with Jeri Ryan showing up, even before Dark Skies, as a woman whose descendant will eventually become a 23rd-century murderer. John de Lancie, Q, shows up as a stalker focused on a country musician who will later become a superstar.
Another Show Lost To Time
As with many other syndicated shows, Time Trax is hard to find in the streaming era thanks to the tangled web of who owns the actual rights to it. Gary Nardino Productions developed the series, while Lorimar Productions helped get it to air, but the problem is that Lorimar was bought by Warner Bros, while Paramount purchased Gary Nardino. The rights to the series were split between two studios, and though it was released on DVD in 2012, nothing has been done with the show since.
Today, if you want to watch Time Trax, you’ll have to find it on DVD, but thankfully, it’s available on Amazon for around $30 a season. As the years go by, it’s a sad reality that more shows like this will be lost to time, and this is another reason to try and preserve physical media while we can.
