Voyagers!

Somewhere in the back of my head there was a show. Time travel. A kid. A guy who dressed like a pirate and carried a pocket watch that glowed. I could not have told you the name of it. I couldn’t tell you when it aired or how long it ran. I just knew it existed, that I had watched it, and that something about it had stuck.

This is a specific kind of memory — not quite a flashback, not quite a dream. A residue. The shape of something without the thing itself.

So I did what you do: I described it to the internet. And the internet, to its credit, came through immediately.

Voyagers! Aired on NBC, one season, 1982 to 1983. Jon-Erik Hexum as Phineas Bogg, a time traveler tasked with keeping history on track, and Meeno Peluce as Jeffrey Jones, a 12-year-old whose encyclopedic knowledge of history becomes essential after Bogg loses his guidebook. The device was called the Omni — a large pocket watch that flashed red when history was wrong and green when the timeline was corrected.

I would have been around seven or eight years old. That tracks.

What I didn’t remember until I went looking: the show was cancelled not because of poor ratings — it averaged a 17 share — but because NBC decided to replace it with a news magazine to compete with 60 Minutes, which then averaged a 7 share. So the network pulled a show kids loved in order to lose to the thing they were trying to beat. Classic.

It was apparently the inspiration for Quantum Leap, which I watched obsessively a few years later and never once connected back to this. The throughline was sitting there the whole time.

The whole series is on Amazon Prime Video if you want to take the trip. I haven’t decided yet whether I want to test the memory or just let it stay in the shape it’s in — half-formed, slightly glowing, red and green depending on the angle.