It’s characteristic of SF TV shows and movies (Star Trek is repeat offender in this regard) that where “future” characters find themselves traveling back in time, they frequently (and conveniently for the producers) find themselves traveling back in time to the year (or approximate year) when the episode or movie was filmed.
E.g. in Star Trek IV (released in 1986), the crew travel back to 1980’s San Francisco, and Captain Archer of Enterprise traveled back to 2004-ish in one episode. Of course, one of the main reasons to do this is that it helps to prevent anachronisms from appearing on screen - you could literally just walk outside today and start filming and expect to not see much that will get you listed on the SMDB’s list of movie anachronisms. Once you start trying to film something that is supposed to be set in, say, 1995, you run the risk that someone’s iPhone will mess it up.
What are some good SF time travel shows or movies that travel back to modern times, but not the year of filming, and do it well? This excludes travel back before, say, 100 years ago (so no medieval time travel stuff, but WW1 is probably ok).
Star Trek’s The City on the Edge of Forever is probably the best example of that. The past sequence is in the 1930s, prior to World War II.
The time travel to not-quite-the-present is often a case of having a set/costumes/etc. available for the period. (Case in point: Star Trek again, which had a few worlds that surprisingly resembled Earth.)
This was the entire premise of Quantum Leap – Sam Beckett could travel back to any time within his own lifetime, and often ended up several years from the then-present.
Doctor Who frequently traveled to various “modern” times that weren’t the then-present, either.
SyFy’s 12 Monkeys is jumping to all sorts of different years, though mostly 2015.
Although, they’ve been building up to traveling back to 1987, which happened at the end of the episode last Friday.
ETA: During LOST’s time travel seasons, much of it took place in the 1970s.
It’s not my jam, but my husband is a huge Dark Shadows fan and they were time hopping all over in that thing, including to the “future” which was in the, I forget which, 80’s or 90’s. My understanding is the reason it works even on a shoestring budget is that the stories are small and personal and never really tried to be anything but just “stories set in different time periods where sometimes there are time traveling vampires”.