1 Grady: {played by Will} Clearly the most interesting time to go back to is 1888. We can discover the identity of Jack the Ripper.
2 Jessica Fisher: {played by Angela} I have a better idea. 1536. Robert Pakington was a British MP, shot in mysterious circumstances, possibly the first person to be murdered with a handgun.
3 {camera angle changes to show Mercutio filming the actors and Ophelia standing by his side, with the backs of Grady and Jessica in the extreme foreground}
3 Mercutio: Jack the Ripper is more interesting, why don't we do that first?
4 Ophelia: That's for later in the first season.
4 Mercutio: You think this will last a season?

I was thinking about mentioning the 1979 film Time After Time here, which has the premise that H. G. Wells is not merely an author who writes about someone inventing a time machine, but actually an inventor of a time machine himself. Jack the Ripper shows up (since Wells lives in 1893) and steals the machine, using it to travel to - guess when? - 1979. The machine has an auto-return feature, and Wells then uses it to chase down The Ripper in this weird future time.

I watched this movie once many years ago, and seem to remember good things about it, but I haven't seen it recently. Anyway, as I was saying, I was going to mention it here, and did some web research, only to discover that there was a recent reboot TV series of the same name, made in 2017. The description sounds intriguing, however the critical reception was poor and the series was cancelled after a season of 12 episodes.

Interestingly, the TV series used lyrics from Cyndi Lauper's 1983 hit song "Time After Time" as the titles for episodes 2 through 11. And - this is the wild part which I had no idea about - Cyndi Lauper originally got the inspiration for writing the song from the 1979 movie of the same name!

Full circle. It's almost as if someone travelled back in time to 1979 to plant the seeds of all this...