26-Episode Time Travel Show On Netflix Is So Good, You'll Have To Watch It Twice

Published Sep 17, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT Sean is a senior writer for ScreenRant and has been writing about new TV releases since December 2023. He has received multiple advance screenings of popular shows and ideated his own coverage read by hundreds of thousands of readers. Sean is a self-published author of a Western novel. Sean has also written award-winning opinion pieces related to local politics while getting his Bachelor's degree in journalism. A time travel show with three seasons on Netflix is so good that viewers will either want or need to watch it twice. Some of the best shows on Netflix are science fiction, and some of the best sci-fi shows on Netflix revolve around time travel. From Stephen King's 11.22.63 to Manifest and Travelers, and even shows that only dip their toes into time travel, like The Umbrella Academy, Netflix is one of the premiere streamers for time travel shows. Time travel shows can often get quite complex, which usually isn't a great thing. Time travel comes with several built-in paradoxes, branching timelines, and massive butterfly effects that can bog a good story down in logistics and theoretical physics. All those complexities can sometimes make a show so confusing that the only way to really understand it is by rewatching it and soaking up all the complex information again. Netflix has one time travel show, however, where the urge to rewatch is actually a benefit and a major mark of quality. Netflix's Dark, a German-language series with 26 episodes across three seasons, is a remarkably complex series. Its complexity doesn't come across as a burden, though, it actually works in the show's benefit. In fact, by the time viewers get around to rewatching Dark, they'll likely do so because they want to more than they need to. Netflix's Dark Is So Complex You'll Need To Watch It Twice To Understand Everything Dark is, simply put, a very dense and complicated show. It has multiple timelines, characters going from the past to the future, back again, and vice versa, and even parallel universes in its later seasons. By virtue of focusing on so many different points in time, the already large cast of characters in Dark is further complicated by multiple actors playing the same character at different stages in life. It's such a complex show that many people suggest watching Dark with a notebook just to keep track of the many characters, timelines, factions, and worlds at play. Even the very concept of time in Dark is difficult to understand; rather than the common conception of time being linear, Dark asserts that it's circular, with the past, present, and future all existing at the same time and influencing one another. Remarkably, however, Dark manages to balance all these concurrent storylines, characters, and theoretical concepts into a really cohesive story. As complicated as it sounds on paper, most viewers will be able to get the gist of Dark's story, assuming they're willing to commit to paying close attention to the show. A second watch is almost certainly necessary to understand everything going on, but even the first watch of Dark is still possible to understand, and it rewards viewers' attention in dividends. Dark Is A Rare Sci-Fi Show That Gets Better On The Second Watch While many viewers will want to watch Dark a second time just to understand all of its heady topics and moving parts, some viewers may also want to watch it again purely because of its quality. Dark is a very rare science fiction show that actually gets better the second time you watch it. Most of that is due to understanding; knowing how the plot, characters, and concepts work and where they're going makes for more casual viewing the second time around, and it also lets viewers see connections and foreshadowing they missed the first time. So many science fiction shows, and especially mystery shows, lose a lot of their luster on the second watch. Knowing what's going to happen and how the whole story plays out saps the show of its tension and suspense. It can be rewarding to rewatch some shows and see how the breadcrumbs of a mystery were hiding in plain sight from the beginning, but it's rarely better than watching the show for the first time and not knowing what to expect. That's simply not the case for Dark. Rewatching the show is basically a whole new experience, one where the mystery is less about the concepts themselves and more about how the show pulled such a complicated story off so flawlessly. On top of that, rewatching the show plays right into Dark's central theme, that time is a flat loop that is constantly repeating and influencing itself. Rewatching Dark may even be better than watching it for the first time. Release Date 2017 - 2020-00-00 Network Netflix Showrunner Jantje Friese Cast Louis Hofmann Jonas Kahnwald Lisa Vicari Martha Nielsen Directors Baran bo Odar Writers Marc O. Seng, Martin Behnke, Ronny Schalk Creator(s) Baran bo Odar, Jantje Friese