Time Abyss / Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5: Lorien and most, if not all, First Ones encapsulate this trope. Lorien most embodies it, however; he was the first sentient being ever (in the Milky Way, at least).
• In the Being Human (UK) episode "The War Child", Mr. Snow, the leader of the Old Ones, is old enough that every vampire currently undead descends from him. His actual age is never given, but he claims to have visited Egypt while it was ruled by the pharaohs and once "met the son of a carpenter" (implied to be Jesus Christ).
• Various beings in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel. There are demons who have been plotting and working towards various ends since before recorded history. One example is the Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart of Wolfram and Hart. Minor demons during the time of Illyria, they have spent the intervening millennia developing a deep control over the mortal and hellish dimensions.
• The Daily Show and The Colbert Report both liked to jokingly identify John McCain as an unbelievably ancient entity — someone who has walked with Jesus, done cave paintings, and crawled out of the primordial seas. Lampshaded with the joke that "The only thing older than jokes about John McCain's age is... John McCain. " And yet, according to his wife Cindy McCain (via an Onion video) "He's not nearly so old as the Ancient Ones. His outer shell has not even yet calcified."
• Doctor Who:
  • While the Doctor technically doesn't qualify, being only 2000ish as of the Twelfth Doctor (he says), they are often portrayed in this manner. Their travels have allowed them to be there for a great deal of the history of many cultures, and after the loss of their own people, a lifetime of agonizing choices between "horrible" and "more horrible", and seeing the cruelty of many to others, they feel old and tired. They've seen the heat death of the universe, and the first written words of all time were written to them. They've lived much more than characters who have lived much longer. Though following "Hell Bent", where the Twelfth Doctor took the long way around spending billions of years making it through his diamond wall in his own personal hell, resetting a new version of himself after the last version died, and remembering every bit of it in the Confession Dial, while physically they're not much older than they were prior to "Hell Bent", mentally they're billions of years old.
  • The Time Lords are this as a culture. While merely long-lived as individuals, the sheer scope of their civilisation's history is staggering. We learn during the course of the series that they are "the oldest civilisation", have had "ten million years of absolute power", and "a billion years of history". They "practically invented" black holes and mastered teleportation "when the universe was less than half its present size". Their history is so long and filled with so many dubious events that even most modern Time Lords are not aware of much of it, and genuine historical events and artifacts are considered mere myths and legends even amongst themselves.
  • It turns out that the Doctor is in fact older than Time Lord civilisation — in reality, they are a mysterious being from an unknown universe who has an unlimited number of regenerations, who was discovered as a child by the first Gallifreyan space traveller before they'd ever become the Time Lords, and who became the source of the Time Lords' ability to regenerate, establishing the Doctor as physically being at least over ten million years old, if not over a billion.
  • Sutekh was imprisoned thousands of years ago, the war inspiring Egyptian mythology, and was active for thousands of years before that.
  • The Fendahl might not qualify, considering that it has technically been dead for 12 million years.
  • The Great Vampires fought against the Time Lords during the early years of the universe, and the only known survivor hid in exo-space (albeit mostly dead) since then.
  • The Face of Boe lives to be more than 5 billion years old.
  • Jack Harkness, being immortal and effectively indestructible, is headed for this at some point. Assuming the line about him becoming the Face of Boe wasn't just a joke, he has a good few billion years left before running Out of Continues. He's currently over 2000 years old, having been Buried Alive for two millennia under Roman Cardiff.
  • The Beast claims to be from before time, and even if that isn't true he is still so old that his language predates the Time Lords.
  • The Racnoss Empress fled and hid almost five billion years ago, and another Racnoss ship is the core of planet Earth. No, the ship isn't hidden in the core; it is the actual, original core, around which the planet formed.
  • The Weeping Angels are so ancient, even the Doctor doesn't have a clue what they are or where they come from. Even the Time Lords call them "the Weeping Angels of old".
  • "The Doctor's Wife": When House hijacks the TARDIS and goes adventuring, it casually mentions that it "should have done this half a million years ago."
  • Ashildr/Me takes The Slow Path from Viking Scandinavia all the way to the final moments of the Universe, but only has a Human-sized memory, leading to an extreme case of The Fog of Ages. What makes this even more impressive is that she's Ageless, but not Invulnerable — and yet she outlives all other Immortals "brilliantly". Before the total collapse of everything, she is picked up by the Doctor and sets off to have her own adventures in space and time, during which she will truly have no equals.
• The Artifact in Eureka is dated to the previous universe. How they have managed to date something that is older than matter itself is unclear. Of course, considering that the theory of continuing Big Bangs and Big Crunches (i.e. the universe collapsing and re-expanding every so often) has been disproven by new evidence, this may no longer be the case.
• The Good Place:
  • Gen. Her name is short for "Hydrogen", because that was the only thing that existed when she was created.
  • Michael mentions a few times that he has existed for as long as the universe. It's unclear if that makes him older or younger than Gen, and the afterlife's bizarre timeline doesn't help.
• Methos in Highlander: The Series is at least 5,000 years old. "At least" because that's the time that Methos took his first head and he claims to not really remember anything before that, so he could potentially be far older than that. His ancientness is somehow even more disorienting because he seems like such a normal guy. He is also one of the four immortals who inspired the "Four Horsemen" myth (Methos was Death). The episode where this is revealed shows that the other three are also still alive (until the end of the episode, that is).
• Lexx:
  • The Prince of Fire claims to have existed since the beginning of time. Which makes sense, since he's essentially Satan.
  • The Time Prophet's own age is unknown, but her memory stretches into the endless cycles of the universe, and she has personally lived from before Brunnis 1 was abandoned to at least the fall of Brunnis-2. It's hinted Vlad, being played by the same actress, is the Time Prophet herself still alive to the present day being tens of thousands of years old.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Sauron is possibly the oldest being in the show, and he has "been awake since before the breaking of the first silence."
• Mr. Young: Mrs. Byrne is so old, she misses the days before the Sun existed.
• Once Upon a Time: Many of the magical creatures like the fairies (the Blue Fairy being a notable standout) are thousands of years old. Mother Gothel, from season seven, takes this a step further: she caused the extinction of humanity and the erasure of magic in The Land Without Magic thousands of years ago, and is actually the current Mother Nature. To clarify, the generation of humanity that she killed off was the one that existed before our ancestors crawled out of the sea and eventually evolved into us. This makes her millions of years old, far outstripping any other character in the series.
• Played with interestingly in an episode of The Orville. The crew discovers a planet that phases in and out of our reality, and whenever it reappears, a period of about ten thousand years has passed on the planet. So to the inhabitants of the planet, the Orville's crew are the abyss.
• In Power Rangers, aliens and other nonhumans tend to be longlived. The backstory of most series was either 10,000 years ago (MMPR, Jungle Fury) or 3,000 years ago (Lost Galaxy, Wild Force) and pretty much any major player outside the teenagers with attitudes will have been there for round one. And of course, being around thousands of years ago doesn't mean you are only that old. Zordon, the original mentor, is especially portrayed as being just so ancient he knows everything you could possibly need to know. However, the character who truly takes the (planet-sized birthday) cake is Power Rangers Operation Overdrive's Sentinel Knight. The five Plot Coupons are scattered across the world because the continents were one when he placed them on Earth. That places PROO's backstory over 250 million years ago. The villains were a Sealed Evil in a Can case, so not even Sentinel's oldest enemies qualify — they slept through all that time while he has been active.
• Played for Laughs on The Red Green Show with the character of Old Man Sedgwick. Various jokes are made about his age, including how he lived through the 1849 Gold Rush, was too old to serve in World War II, and proved his citizenship by showing the border patrol a photo of himself with Canadian Prime Minister John A. Macdonald (born in 1815) when Macdonald was a child. His son is 97 years old. His parents are also (somehow) still alive, his mother being Old Lady Sedgwick (and bearing a tattoo that says "George Washington slept here") and his father being Dead Man Walking Sedgwick.
• Stargate-verse:
  • Stargate SG-1: Merlin/Myrddin lived some 10,000 years ago, then "ascended" into an energy being, only to take back human form millennia later, living amidst humans, then going for suspended animation and sleeping there for a few hundred years more. When he transfers his memories to Daniel Jackson, Daniel notes that "he wasn't kidding about having lived many lifetimes".
  • A lot of aliens in the series are extremely long lived. Many of the Goa'uld System Lords such as Ra and Apophis were running galaxy wide empires at least 5000 years ago, Asgard such as Thor and Loki inspired the idea for the Norse gods and live on through cloning and mind transfers, the original Replicators from the Pegasus galaxy were built to fight the Wraith over 10,000 years ago, many of those Wraith are also still around due to their own regenerative abilities, and many of the Ancients, notably the ones who Ascended have been around for 10,000 years minimum. In fact, a lot of Ancient technology also counts, including Atlantis, which is at least 1 million years old. The Stargates and Destiny are even older.
  • Thanks to the cancellation of Stargate Universe, we'll never know what Rush meant when he said that the Destiny's mission involves finding a structure as old as the Universe itself.
• Star Trek
  • The Immortal Flint from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode, Requiem For Methuselah.
    • In the episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, Bele claims to have been chasing the political "criminal" Lokai for 50,000 years. He later discovers that in his absence, his people have annihilated each other in a genocidal race war.
    • The Guardian of Forever, from "The City on the Edge of Forever." The reason it can serve as a Portal to the Past is because it was physically there for everything.
  • The Borg Collective is once described as "thousands of centuries" old.
  • The disembodied mind Sargon has existed for at least 500,000 years.
  • The Q Continuum are a race of bodiless Energy Being creatures that evolved from a mortal race that existed shortly after the formation of the universe; some of the oldest members of the Q race are noted to be upwards of 10 billion years old or more. The principal Q with the most screen time in the series (portrayed by John De Lancie) that has a rivalry with Captain Picard, notes offhand that he had a romance with another Q that has been "on again and off again" for 5 billion years; making him at least that old, if not more so^note though that particular Q is a notoriously Unreliable Narrator.
• Supernatural: The Primordial Entities are a group of nigh-omnipotent cosmic beings that are older than time, space, and Creation itself. They include: God, His sister The Darkness, Death (who, if he is to be believed, could potentially be older then God), and the Four Archangels. While they were made after the creation of the univers, Leviathans, Angels, and the Soul are also incredibly ancient.
• While even "young" vampires in True Blood are generally old by human standards, only a handful reach the ages required to qualify as a time abyss. From what we see of the handful who do, though including Russell Edgington on the low end, along with Warlow and Lilith as more dramatic examples, that's probably a very good thing.
• The Ultramen certainly qualify. Every single known individual is thousands of years old, with the original Ultraman claiming to be twenty thousand years old in the final episode of his series. Ultraman Mebius and Ultraman Zero are less than seven thousand years old, and considered teenagers. The oldest known Ultras are Physical Gods with Mysterious Pasts Ultraman King and Ultraman Noa, who are both over 300 thousand years old, while the Father of Ultra (the oldest standard Ultra) is over 130 thousand.
• Played for Laughs in Wizards of Waverly Place. Juliet is a vampire who is over 9500 years old, and Prof. Crumbs, the headmaster of Wiztech, considers it a compliment when Alex says he doesn't look a day over 800, and was an adult when the wheel was invented, making him nearly as old as Juliet.