Have bag, will time travel

By any measure, Dan is your average 21st-century slacker.

As a facilities manager at a small Massachusetts college, he’s the type of guy who turns a deaf ear to complaints that a lecture hall is too warm so he can leave work early to meet his girlfriend. The only thing is, the woman he’s meeting is actually Paul Revere’s daughter, and the way he gets to her is by a giant duffel bag that doubles as a time machine.

That, in a nutshell, is the premise of the irreverent new halfhour comedy “Making History,” premiering tonight on Fox.

Of course, Dan’s (Adam Pally, “Happy Endings,” “The Mindy Project”) travels to the past come with repercussions in the present. His romance with Deborah Revere (Leighton Meester, “Gossip Girl,” “Country Strong”) in 1775, where he uses modern-day songs and comedy routines to make friends with the Lexington, Mass., Colonialists, has already delayed the start of the Revolution by several days and thus jeopardizes American independence from Great Britain and world history.

So with the help of Deborah, his 2017 professor friend Chris (Yassir Lester, “Girls,” “Key and Peele”) and founding fathers Sam Adams and John Hancock (Neil Casey, John Gemberling), he must rouse the citizenry to action and get history back on track.

“I think that probably with what’s going on in America right now, people are looking for a little bit of escapism,” Pally told a recent gathering of journalists in Pasadena, Calif., “and time travel, we were lucky enough to be making this show at a time politically where we were able to look back at the way America was formed as a lot of the rights that we hold so dear now kind of being taken away from us. So that was a really fun way to approach it comedically.”

But why a duffel bag? Time machines on TV and in film have taken on many different forms, ranging from a phone booth in “Doctor Who” to a DeLorean sports car in the “Back to the Future” movies.

But for this production, the duffel bag came about for two reasons, according to executive producer and writer Julius Sharpe.

“As I thought about it and I was writing this time travel show, the one thing I didn’t want to do, I didn’t want to have to spend all my time at work dealing with, like, some big orb,” he says. “So it was like, what would be the easiest thing productionwise? It just seemed like a duffel bag.

“And then I was thinking about multiple people being stuck in a duffel bag together. Seemed like that could be funny. ”