Time travellers on mission have their journey extended by Netflix
Travelers Seasons 1 and 2 streaming on Netflix. Season 3 will arrive later in 2018 Call it the nature of the binge.
Eric McCormack and Brad Wright, the star and the creator, respectively, of the Canadian scifi series Travelers, have each had long careers on network television that predate the rise of Netflix and other bingeable platforms.
So there is a sense of freedom now that the third season of the show, which began life in Canada on Showcase, will stream exclusively on the juggernaut provider. For one, there are no time restrictions on episodes as there are on network TV. Writers can also be a little more risque in terms of language and sex. But perhaps the biggest change is that Netflix wants episode endings geared toward the binge-watching enthusiast.
“We’re used to the idea of somebody at the network going: ‘We’ve got to wrap it up ... Every episode needs a little ending. We have to have an ending!’ ” says McCormack in an interview at the Banff World Media Festival.
Netflix “was the opposite. “They said ‘Make sure, whatever you end on, it’s going to force the person to watch the next one.’ The endings are always so interesting and weird. Sometimes it’s literally a cliffhanger. Sometimes it’s the introduction of a whole new character or idea in the last scene.”
Season 3, which wraps at the beginning of July and will start streaming worldwide in late 2018, builds on the show’s track record of attracting viewers who binge.
In December, Netflix released a list of its most binge-watched programs of 2017. For shows that users watched more than two hours a day, Travelers ranked seventh. That placed it ahead of the creepy true-crime series The Keepers and supernatural mystery The OA.
Wright, who joined McCormack in Banff this year, said it was no sure thing that season 3 would even happen. Showcase had bowed out, which could have killed the series outright.
Luckily, Netflix, where Travelers has streamed internationally from the beginning, stepped in to become season 3’s exclusive home. Perhaps it was because Netflix so intimately understands that whole binge philosophy. But it would have seemed cruel to devoted fans if the plug were pulled after the second season’s cliffhanging finale.
For the uninitiated, the Travelers are a group of operatives from the future who travel back to our time and inhabit the bodies of those about to die. With their new identities and under the command of a mysterious “Director,” the team attempts to prevent certain events that will lead to mankind’s demise at some point in the future.
In the season 2 finale, the Travelers — led by McCormack’s Grant MacLaren — are forced to commit a serious breach of protocol thanks to the equally mysterious antagonist Vincent. He orders the group to reveal themselves to the world or put their loved ones in peril. It’s a lot more complicated than that, of course. But the bottom line is that the team will have a lot of cleaning up to do.
“We’ve got some secrets we’ve got to contain, before the whole world finds out,” McCormack says. “That’s the journey of the first few episodes, trying to get back to some kind of normalcy. Our normalcy is that we’re here, we wait for our missions, the Director tells us everything and we trust the Director.
“The one overall thing I would say about season 3 is that we start to question where our orders come from,” McCormack says. “Who is giving them to us? Have we been on the right path all along? That creates, particularly in my character, a lot of strife. He’s referred to as a boy scout. He is a true believer and it’s hard (for him) to question.”
McCormack, who also produces the show and directed both the season 2 finale and season 3 opener, will start filming the next season of Will & Grace four days after Travelers wraps. The Toronto native announced the third season of Travelers in March with a tweet that highlighted the pure Canadian DNA of its cast and crew.
Medicine Hat native MacKenzie Porter, Nesta Cooper of Mississauga, Ont., Flin Flon native Jared Abrahamson and Vancouver’s Reilly Dolman play McCormack’s fellow travellers, making the series a purely homegrown phenomenon.