To quote Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Dan Vasser (Kevin McKidd) has become unstuck in time. In the NBC series Journeyman, the San Francisco-based journalist finds himself transported to various periods in the city’s past, where he is compelled to intervene in the lives of those around him. Complicating things further is the fact that Dan’s presumed-dead first love Livia turns up as a fellow time traveller who knows more than she’s telling. Abbie Bernstein spoke to the star and creators of what some critics have described as the new Quantum Leap.

“We wanted it to be romantic,” says Kevin Falls, Journeyman’s creator and executive producer. “And what surprised me about Kevin McKidd, coming off of Rome, is how much he loves romance. He always wanted to play a romantic. That surprised me. I thought he’d be a sword guy.”

“He’s a really complex character,” is how McKidd describes Dan Vasser. “He’s going through a really emotional thing, and it’s got loads of different levels to it. So I need to, more than I normally would, put my trust in Alex [Graves] the director, because he’s the one who’s getting what I was trying to give. We were trying to do something subtle, not too explicit, but still get the point across for the audience. So I had to trust him a lot and he was great, just kind of guiding me through the complex reactions to this bizarre situation.”

Alex Graves, who directed the first two episodes in the series, has his own take on Dan. “He is a good person, and he’s aware that he’s been both blessed and cursed with this ability. And being the good person that he is, he does plug into helping people…But some of his problems in the early episodes are from him going off-track, because he either doesn’t like a character he’s supposed to be defending, or there’s a much larger problem in history that he feels he should get involved with, and yet should not touch."

Dan in surreal life

Graves says that a key part of Journeyman centres on Dan’s conflict over how involved he should become with his own life and whether he should break ‘the rules’. “He knows very early on that if he were to go back and affect Livia that he would have no son, so that kind of slows it down. He also really loves his wife, so he’s in an odd position.”

Yep, Dan’s in an odd position alright. Not least in his complex relationship with two women – the mysterious Livia (Moon Bloodgood) and his present-day wife Katie (Gretchen Egolf). “One is his soul mate that he thought died,” Falls explains, “and one is a woman that he raised a family with. So it is actually a great balance – his beautiful soul mate and a woman that he loves very much in the present.”

Falls adds that Livia went through some transformations between the original concept and the character we see on our TV screens. “We wanted to ground her and make her feel a little bit more real and on the same plane. She’s been travelling longer than Kevin’s character, and it made her too wise. It almost made her like Yoda. And we decided, let’s make them feel more like ex-lovers who are suddenly thrust into this weird situation.”

Fantasy and romance

Graves says that one of the most challenging yet enjoyable aspects of Journeyman was making it clear that events are occurring in the same space, but in different years or even decades. “It is difficult. Part of the fun of it is saying, ‘What should the art direction be like? What phone did you have? Were cell phones invented? What toys were kids playing with? What cars were people driving? What were women wearing?’ All of that is a very big part of the show. On the pilot, we were doing all these different periods, because people in the late 80s and the mid-90s did not have the technology that we now have…What we’re trying to do is a character-based modern romance. Time travel is facilitating that in the concept of the show, but San Francisco is a great romantic city, which is the perfect backdrop.”

For McKidd, it was partly the fantasy aspects of Journeyman that appealed to him. “When I read the pilot, it reminded me of things like Donnie Darko and Jacob’s Ladder - movies that when you watch them, you sit with your friends and you go, ‘Well, I thought this happened,’ and they go, ‘No, no, I got something else from it!’ People have different takes, and it’s not all laid out on a plate for you. That’s what I like about this script - it makes you think, it makes you try and work out exactly what is happening.

“I think the great thing about the show,” McKidd concludes, “is that it really is a show about love and the complication of love…It isn’t a show about time travel, it’s about the love that he has for these two women – and that’s the key.”