Timeless' Abigail Spencer on Finding Out Her Show Was Canceled and Revived in the Span of 3 Days

Timeless returns on Sunday, March 11 and Abigail Spencer has a message for the loyal fans who helped save the show from cancellation

By Chris Harnick Mar 09, 2018 8:00 PMTags
Watch: "Timeless" Star Abigail Spencer Sends a Message to Loyal Fans

Abigail Spencer was on a roller coaster last spring. The Timeless star found out her show was canceled…and three days later it was brought back to life.

"It was wild," she told E! News during a recent interview.  "What a week it was. It was a tough week."

On Wednesday, May 10, Spencer got the call from co-creator Eric Kripke. "He said, ‘We put up a good fight, but it's not going to happen.' We're a big show, we have a very large production budget and really high value. We shoot the show at a very elevated level and we want to keep it that way. We want the quality to be really good and that takes a lot. We make a different movie every week," Spencer said, noting she understood the logistics of the cancellation.

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"I always give myself 24-hours to grieve," she said. So when Rise star Josh Radnor said he wrote a play and asked her to be in it, she was ready to go. After agreeing to do the play, she celebrated a friend's birthday all-night and prepared for a visit from her mother.

"I slept in after being out all night and around 11 a.m. I finally turned on my phone, on Saturday…I've never gotten so many text messages, phone calls and tweets. I thought it was a joke, I saw the headline and I was like, ‘Those fans!' because our fans are quite rabid. I don't think I knew how much people loved the show until that happened," she said.

This year, the Timeless crew only travels to interact with women and people of color, and that was "very intentional on our writers' behalf," she said. "But also it was decided before the Time's Up and #MeToo movement."

And for the fans who helped save Timeless, she has a message to deliver right to you. Click play on the video above to hear it.

Timeless returns Sunday, March 11 at 10 p.m. on NBC.

(E! and NBC are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)