Time Police in Live-Action TV series.
Examples:
- Bernard's Watch: The Postman makes sure the watch's owner doesn't use it to commit crimes. He also ensures that time loops don't occur (such as when Bernard's cousin Lucy kept trying to rewind the watch).
- The Janitor and the clone of Josie in Black Hole High. The clone was an agent from the future sent to ensure the safety of the timeline by having time travel technology develop in the right hands. The Janitor was from the further future and was a much more knowledgeable time policeman.
- The Cleaners in Charmed are an organisation dedicated to upholding The Masquerade, though, in carrying this objective out, they are capable of acting as Time Police Officers, by such means as turning back time and even erasing all trace of offenders from existence if they deem it necessary.
- Continuum: when it comes to enforcing the correct timeline, There Are No Police. There is, however, an intimidating cult of vigilante temporal enforcers known as Freelancers who act much more like a time Mafia than time police.
- Doctor Who:
- The exact mission of the Time Lords was never made clear, but it's implied that they somehow kept watch on time travel, dealing with any paradoxes and stopping people abusing it. And stopping the Clock Roaches from eating planets.
- The Time Agency was initially thought to be humanity's Time Police. Between New Who and Torchwood, though, it's hinted to be a mix of this and opportunists.
- Kamen Rider Den-O has the main protagonists acting as a form of Time Police, protecting the timestream from the Imagin, whose goal is to change the future by rampaging in the past. The Hero Ryotaro occasionally tries to bend the rules to help the Victim of the Week with whatever problem they've got. The fifth/seventh movie (Episode Yellow of the Chō Den-O Trilogy) introduces an actual Time Cop, who
arrests anyone who alters history, good or bad; naturally, he ends up becoming the movie's antagonist as aside from anything else, by this point Den-O himself is a walking changed timestream. - Legends of Tomorrow:
- The Time Masters. Rip Hunter is a renegade Time Master who wants to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, despite the fact the Time Masters say it was supposed to "go wrong". They eventually discover that the Time Masters have been manipulating all of history from the Vanishing Point, which gives them complete omniscience except regarding the Vanishing Point itself. They saw a Thanagarian invasion coming, and decided that Vandal Savage was the only one who could stop it, so they subtly altered history to bring him to power and unite the world under his rule. The Legends destroy the Vanishing Point, disband the Time Masters, and kill Savage long before he rises to power.
- In the second season, the Legends have taken over the Time Police duties... but they're kind of terrible at it. They work to fix "aberrations" caused by rogue time travelers, and while they do mostly fix things, they also make an embarrassing number of accidental changes to the timeline in the process. These include giving Albert Einstein's wife credit as a genius equal to her husband, loosing zombies on the Civil War, seducing the queen of France, and giving Mick a Revolutionary War statue.
- Rip eventually creates a new organization to replace the Time Masters. The Time Bureau agents are more professional and bureaucratic, and no fans of the Legends. (Eventually, that does include Rip himself. No one's above the law, so they arrest their own founder after he pulls some Legend-style rulebeaking.) By season 4, the Time Bureau and the Legends reach an understanding where the Time Bureau handles the routine policing of the time stream and the Legends are sent to deal with the really weird stuff like time traveling magical creatures.
- Lost's show runners have described Mrs. Hawking as a "temporal policeman" who prevents Desmond from changing the past during his initial visit to 1996.
- Loki (2021) establishes the Time Variance Authority in the MCU. They are a brutally fascistic organization that ruthlessly polices the timeline, and answer to no one but the unseen "Time-Keepers". According to their own propaganda, long ago, a multiversal war threatened to destroy all of creation, so the TVA was established to ensure only one timeline ("the Sacred Timeline") existed. Any branching paths or new timelines are "reset" and folded into the main timeline before they can cause any trouble, and anyone who creates a new timeline (a "variant") is put on trial and sentenced accordingly. Ultimately, the actions of Loki and Sylvie throughout the first season end up causing the Sacred Timeline to branch, renewing the threat of the instigators behind the war.
- The Spanish show The Ministry of Time is about how the Spanish government regulates time travel.
- NTSF:SD:SUV::: The "Time Angels" who appear in two separate episodes to upstage the regular cast are a trio of beautiful female agents that spoof Charlie's Angels, except they patrol time. Their arch-enemy is Leonardo da Vinci, who invented time travel so that he could claim to be responsible for all other inventions as well.
- The Outer Limits (1995) had recurring character Nicholas Prentice, a senior agent of a future time travel agency. He and his colleagues ensure the regulation of time travel, but he is allowed to Set Right What Once Went Wrong himself (succeeding when he brings a Nazi war criminal to justice, but failing when he can't prevent a Presidential assassination). His agency recruits its agents by plucking people out of their timeline moments before they were set to die in fatal accidents. The introduction of the agency lessens the impact of episodes such as 'Final Appeal' and many others with dark endings as it gives hope that things can always be set right.
- Not exactly time travel, but in Parallax the Guardians are charged with preventing pollution of the alternate realities.
- Though no actual time police feature in Phil of the Future, Lloyd tells Phil that new laws regarding time travel were passed due to their family's intervention and was named after them, so there are stronger restrictions on Casual Time Travel. What that meant for Phil was that when his family returned to the future, they would be legally prevented from returning to the past.
- Mirai Sentai Timeranger and their American counterparts Power Rangers Time Force. Though Time Force was originally just a non-time-traveling 30th century elite police force with a Time Machine Combining Mecha, a Time Ship, and a Humongous Mecha that forms and mans a Cool Gate for time travel. Ya know, just in case.
- Averted in both Power Rangers Turbo and Power Rangers S.P.D., for identical reasons: one character in each (the Blue Senturion and the Omega Ranger) is both a Space Police officer and a time traveler, but they're only trying to Set Right What Once Went Wrong after an alien invasion won; their normal cop duties have nothing to do with time travel.
- Averted in the various Stargate series, especially Stargate SG-1, but still worth mentioning because that setting really should have Time Police. Despite multiple methods of Time Travel in the setting, there are no people or Clock Roaches preventing paradox or enforcing a preferred timeline. Despite Precursors and Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who are totally willing to tell humanity You Are Not Ready on other issues like interstellar travel and certain weapons of war, they've never warned people away from screwing with history. Both good guys and bad guys do it. When people time travel and step on the Butterfly of Doom, the heroes have to make Heroic Sacrifices to Set Right What Once Went Wrong and still put up with a Close-Enough Timeline.
- Star Trek:
- The Temporal Prime Directive, enforced by a variety of time agents who seem to have no relation to each other (and should be constantly getting in each other's way.) Captain Kirk harried the time agents to no end.
- Voyager twice ran into Starfleet Time Police from the 29th century. In one encounter, the lead time cop investigates a future disaster that Janeway and Voyager will trigger, only to discover that it's his own future self, turned Inspector Javert, after dealing with one too many Janeway encounters.
- Then there was the whole Temporal Cold War thing in Enterprise, where it was implied that Daniels' side was mostly there to keep history going as it should have done.
- Deep Space Nine had Temporal Investigations, which seems to be based in the present (theirs, that is, not the viewer's). The names of the two agents we saw were Dulmer and Lucsly.
- And also Gary Seven- and whomever he works for- from the TOS episode Assignment: Earth. He claims to be "from" the time period the episode is set in (1960s) but for the episode's purposes he's only there to stop a nuclear explosion. We probably would have found out more in the planned series, but it never came to be; nonetheless, he's been in the expanded universe a few times.
- Fate in the Supernatural episode "My Heart Will Go On".
- Timecop was a short-lived spin-off series based on the Van Damme Timecop movie. A new protagonist travels back in time Once per Episode to stop evil time travellers.
- The American show Timeless has three agents (a history professor, a scientist and a marine) doing esentially TimeCop work.
- The Guardians of Time in The Tomorrow People (1973), presumably. The Guardians are a more advanced form of human than homo superior (called either homo novus or homo sapiens temporum), though it isn't exactly clear what their role is, as their appearances all involve them being lured into traps by villains seeking to exploit their ability to facilitate time travel.
- The Commission in The Umbrella Academy (2019) which mostly 'preserves' the timeline by assassinating anyone who might make things happen otherwise.
- Voyagers! is an interesting concept, in that there's no actual evidence of meddling by anyone other than the Voyagers themselves. Their purpose is to make sure history went the way their records say it did. Is this a Stable Time Loop?
