Several years ago, which was 2012-2014, I got into steampunk. I got to looking for TV shows with that campy, pulp-adventuring feel. When I asked on Reddit, and also googled for some to watch. Including:
The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (1993–1994)
The Librarians (2014)
The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne (2000)
And this one. I tried now for about 30 minutes to find it. I have no idea if it was a miniseries or a full show, because I could only find three. I think there was some kind of legal trouble behind scenes.
The tone was incredibly camp, and very pulp heavy. It had a lot of steampunk aesthetics. Live-action. Which was cool just in of itself. It was about four, maybe five people: a lead professor-type and his gorgeous female assistant. I thought 2-3 others. British accents on the professor and his assistant in a Victorian steampunk dress. Something about how it was produced, I think was supposed to give it a cool straight-out-of-a-dime-novel look. But came off as lots of lens flare and screen filters, with kind of uncanny valley, disconcerting, almost surreal levels of color saturation.
They met at a very Victorian bar. The professor had worked at a major university. He was the sputtering eccentric, "I'm right, you fools" type. His assistant was the secret money to humor him, because it was suggested that they had sex off-screen. The main character, Professor/Doctor, knew a guy for just about everything. I think it was the first adventure to introduce the characters. The show wasn't directly about either H.G. Wells or Jules Verne. But being very steampunk, had a ton of that kind schtick. And moxie. The backgrounds were either just very heavily filtered or had a lot of for-TV computer-generated background stuff with a thin layer over it.
The first major get-to-know-the-characters-and-form-the-crew scene was about some relic or experimental-based "blah blah blah, this theory could work, by Jove" type thing. Involving, I think, a blimp ride to a laboratory, to meet another eccentric type. Then don't touch the desktop orbital mechanics toy in a cheaply-rendered laboratory and lots of blue and green-screening to show it's actually a well-funded thing. That happens to be part of a cult or secret society. Because the upstanding professor's technobabble theories are right. So of course, that adventure was about a submarine and and time travel, where "don't touch this thing till we get to whatever" spot. But oops, someone does disturb the gold colors gyroscope and orbital mechanics desktop fidget toy. Oh no. Cut out card of characters going or we can pick a spot at random, this should be fun! There was a blue-ish green flash from a timey wimey device, that was I suspect one of those orbital mechanics magnet desktop toys you can find on Amazon. But still looked cool, with lots of smoke and lens flare. They tried to stop it, but couldn't; they don't know if the submarine[?] will be okay.
Is this ringing a bell? Or did I misremember the hell out a show?
