Heartbreak is shitty, there's no two ways around it. It can especially be complicated too as a girl in her early 20s with minimal emotional direction but all of the confidence that she knows everything--advice given to her by another drunk early 20s girl in the bathroom at a club.

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Falling Backwards into Yourself is a 60 minute single-cam procedural dramedy set in assorted time periods and locations across history including New York City (1778, 1894, 1962), different locations in England (1590, 1861, 2010), Paris (1926), Italy (1517), and Ann Arbor, Michigan (2017, 2019).

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At the top of this show, Lindsay Peck, a graduate student studying history at the University of Michigan, is dumped. And then, within the same hour finds herself transported back in time to 1590s England through a Wizard-of-Oz-type situation of being knocked out cold.

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In any time travel show or film, the goal is to get back to one’s own time, but when the 'how' isn't immediately clear, and all initial attempts fall through (pinching every bit of her arms, dunking her head underwater, trying to jump off a roof, etc.), she opts to distract herself with the secondary issue of surviving in the past. As if the emotional pain of a breakup isn’t hard enough, she deals with the roadblocks of being a woman back in time because on top of everything, feminism isn't a thing yet.

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Eventually, she finds that a good whack to her head can move her forward in time--sometimes. And it only moves her so far forward where she happens to land in places that host some famous love stories of the history she has dedicated theses to.

 

Lindsay visits 7 different times, meeting Aaron Burr and Theodosia, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, JFK and Jackie Kennedy, etc. In each time, Lindsay finds herself spending time obsessing and fixating on these relationships--as if by knowing their stories from studying history, maybe she can help so that they get the happy ending they deserve.

 

However, a la Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, nothing actually changes. Someone still die without the finality of true love in their hearts no matter how hard she tries to keep it together for them. Everything that was to happen already has, and nothing she can do can change anything.

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Most surprising to her, however, is how in each time, the people that 'play' the key characters remain the same. Production wise, they are double casted, but to Lindsay it just means that someone like William Shakespeare and Prince Albert look identical. Who knew. The basic personalities of each actor/character they play remains the same as well, so Lindsay comes to know each of them, even though when she moves to new times they do not come to know her.

 

But we cannot forget the heartbreak, and a cruel reminder to her is that one of these reoccurring characters, as she finds out, is her (now) ex-boyfriend, Colin. Whatever name he takes on in that time, she always finds herself in his vicinity--sometimes single, and other times betrothed to someone else. As she grows and learns through her travels, she comes to know Colin as many men, but she also comes to know new sides of him that maybe don't make him out to be this dream man she wanted him to be while they were dating. She starts to realize that while she loves him and will forever, they may not have been meant for one another.

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Eventually, she circles back to her own time, but not before projecting her every emotional issue onto these famous lovers of history and learning that love is complicated and cruel and oftentimes ends in the most vicious of ways. But it is still there even when we know the ending. And the fact that it was there matters.

 

The tone of the show is the fun and lighthearted comedy combined with drama and heart akin to season 1 of Once Upon a Time or This is Us. It shows historical figures in a fun and light way but not without the expression that even these great people of history were flawed humans, and it is meant to break your heart and mend it together in different ways with every episode.

 

This show, at its heart, is a love letter to love.