TV shows that went into the Multiverse

Multiverses seem to be the big thing in movies these days.

Everything Everywhere All At Once won the Oscar for Best Picture. Doctor Strange went into the Multiverse of Madness in his newest movie, and Marvel is so invested in the idea of the multiverse that they’ve dubbed the next three phases the Multiverse Saga.

But what about on television? What shows have explored the concept of the multiverse over the years?

The Arrowverse

Flash was the first show in The CW’s series of interconnected superhero shows to tackle the idea of the multiverse. Flash presented the idea of multiple parallel worlds with characters able to travel to and from other universes with relative ease. Of course, the concept of the multiverse couldn’t be contained in just the Flash series, and characters from other universes began to appear in Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow, Batwoman, and Supergirl.

In fact, for a long time, Supergirl took place entirely in a parallel universe to the rest of the shows, with characters visiting each other from time to time. The growing presence of the multiverse finally culminated in the five-part mega-event series Crisis on Infinite Earths, an event that not only took over all of the shows in the Arrowverse continuity, but also ended up bringing in characters from almost every previous DC series from the past, including Smallville, Birds of Prey, and the Batman series from the 1960s.

Star Trek

Characters from Star Trek have traveled through the multiverse plenty of times over the franchise’s fifty-plus years of existence. However, there is one specific parallel universe in the history of the series that really stands out in terms of exploring the idea of the multiverse. The Mirror Universe was first explored in the episode Mirror, Mirror of Star Trek: The Original Series. This universe featured evil versions of the crew of the Enterprise and is perhaps best known in pop culture for the evil version of Spock sporting a beard.

“Mirror, Mirror,” was praised as one of the best episodes of the original series and the franchise ended up returning to the Mirror Universe several times. In fact, five different episodes from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine feature this particular parallel universe. In recent years, Star Trek: Discovery featured a multi-episode storyline that centered around characters from the Mirror Universe making their way into the Star Trek prime universe.

Community

One episode in particular of this sitcom gets it on the list of multiverse tv shows, and it serves as one of the best introductions to multiverse storytelling for those that might be unfamiliar with it.

In the show’s third season, the episode “Remedial Chaos Theory” featured the group getting together to celebrate Troy and Abed’s new apartment. When nobody wants to go get the pizza, they roll a dice to determine which character has to leave the group to get the food. This splits the episode into seven different timelines, each creating a different parallel universe as the events unfold wildly differently depending on who was the person that had to leave the table for a few minutes.

While the rest of the series follows the final and “best” timeline of the choices, some of the characters will reference the possible other timelines and wonder what might be going on in them. They also wonder if they’re in the “darkest timeline” as they can never know how things turned out in the other universes they created.

Sliders

Sliders was a science fiction show from the 1990s that would serve as a sort of Lost in Space story but had its main cast lost in the multiverse rather than space. The main characters of the show were able to travel, or “slide,” between universes, but due to a mishap early in the series, they lost the coordinates for their original universe. The team is forced to move to a new universe each chance that they get, hoping that the next slide will be the one to bring them back to their original universe.

Each new universe is explored, usually varying in some significant way from our own. They find a universe where America lost the Revolutionary War, a universe where dinosaurs still exist, a universe where men give birth, and plenty of others.

The series managed to stay on the air for five seasons, but it was a turbulent run. The show was canceled and moved to a different channel partway through the series. There was also an issue of the cast constantly changing with only one of the original main cast making it all the way through the five-season run.

Actor John Rhys-Davies who starred in the first three seasons said that the show’s concept was the best on television but the scripts that they were given were complete gibberish. Nevertheless, despite the troubles behind the scenes, Sliders developed a cult fanbase that still follows to this day as new people continue to discover the series.

Fringe

In the fall of 2008, Fringe was one of the most anticipated shows set to debut in the new television season. Lost was going into its third season and was one of the biggest shows on television making creator J.J. Abrams the newest big name in television. Fringe was the next show to come from Abrams and many people were looking to Fringe as the potential next major television show in the cultural zeitgeist.

The show focused on a group of agents who worked in the fringe division of the FBI, a division that was created to investigate unexplained and perhaps supernatural phenomena, particularly surrounding the existence of a parallel universe. The idea of the show was that it would be able to balance procedural, mystery-of-the-week style storytelling with the more serialized style of show that was becoming more and more popular.

While Abrams had already had two major hits with Alias and Lost both being serialized, the biggest shows on television were mostly still procedurals, and the plan was to be able to create something that would work on both levels. While the viewership for the first few episodes was high, the reviews were mixed and viewership began to decline. The show was eventually moved to the Friday night death slot, but enough of the audience stuck around.

As the series continued, it began to grow more serialized with further exploration of the show’s mythology including an expanding multiverse and alternate timelines. In the end, the show managed to produce a hundred episodes over five seasons, with fans agreeing that the later seasons were far better as the show began to lean into what really worked for the worlds that the series was trying to build.

Have you seen any of the following shows mentioned? Which shows would you like to see fall into a multiverse?

Let us know in the comments below!