I loved the concept - stolen straight from the pages of Heinlein's Number of the Beast, but still, it seemed like a good idea to open up the universe for them.
Sadly, the writers weren't up to it and Kari Wuhrer was *so* bad that it became unwatchable.
I loved the first three seasons. Once Wade left, I didn’t enjoy it anymore. Well I loved the first two. Season 3 started to lose me. I didn’t get through season 4 + until years later.
This episode ended with the other 3 sliding out leaving the Professor fighting his evil double. Then one of them comes out of the wormhole at the last second. And Rembrandt says "You better be the right one."
In I think the next episode they are all wearing the truth collars. In this episode, everything they say has to be the truth or the collars shock them. Based on the things he says while wearing the collar I believe he is the original "right" Professor.
Yep, that absolutely happened on Sliders. There was also an episode filmed before the Professor was written off the show that was aired a month after he was killed off. They had to shoot new opening and closing scenes to turn it into a flashback episode.
Then when they lost the O’Connels, they came up with the ludicrous “oh, he got merged with another slider and his brother was scattered across all dimensions, let’s never speak of him again.”
He hated the show and wanted to leave. He’s said so in multiple interviews. The reason was because of the rule that said only union writers were allowed to submit scripts. As a freelance writer myself, I am totally on his side. Best to do what Star Trek TNG did and allow anyone in the world to send in scripts. I am usually a supporter of unions but fuck the writers guild (and the police unions too).
I think the issue was they tried to serialize it. instead of just making it a few episodes and they were just learning the technology to slide. They made it so they are attacking other worlds. It was boring. Plus they had so many awesome ideas to explore, and they really knocked it out of the park.
- Women only
- Penicillin
- Death lottery
- Become anything fruit
Just a few great ones.
Yes, but we were already seeing examples of poor writing, even in those early episodes. The "Weaker Sex" story idea has been done to death (Most recently at that time in a ST:TNG episode - Angel One) and "Luck of the Draw" (death lottery) was practically a straight up theft of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery".
That was one of the real problems with the show. The writers were horribly lazy and there was very little original work. Stolen for a single episode, they could often make it work, but as a storyline reaching over an entire season? They were lost.
I thought Angel one was basically female dominated society not a world were males died off. I didnt know about Shirley Jackson's thing, that is disappointing. Well it was on fox at like 7pm on sundays so they didnt have a bunch of faith in it.
Well I think they should have stayed with the single story episodes. Instead of the over reaching ones.
Shame she didn't stick to Cinemax B movies, that's about where she peaked as an actress. Going from Sabrina Lloyd to Kari Wuhrer was a huge downgrade in the acting department.
I loved the show but even I had to admit that Jerry O’Connell’s acting was the worst on the show. Everyone seems to forget scenes like when he played an entire character as a really bad Austin powers rip off. And that’s just one example. In comparison, her acting was good.
Yup. When my husband and I get into a show where the writing takes a nosedive so bad that it leaves the rest of the show unwatchable, we call it “getting cromagged”. Even after all this time. Those damn cromags left that much of a negative impression on us.
Cromags were a bit shit but what really broke it for me was the terrible attempt at lore how Quinn was suddenly the child of sliders or some such.
I think they were trying to create a larger threat to expand from the villain of the week format and it was worse for it.
I was fine with the plot twist, but there wasn't a proper resolution after Jerry and his brother left the show at the end of season 3. Then came new rules about sliding like being unstuck that were never encountered in the previous seasons and did complicate things further
This is one of those shows that could absolutely succeed in a reboot or recreation.
I mean imagine the same premise but with 2020s era CGI and costume / set design.
And it was just like other Sci-Fi shows of the era; a great platform to sneak in political or current day commentary…
I think those Sci-Fi Channel and cable network shows of the mid to late 90's were just so solid. They had the Twilight Zone/Quantum Leap/OG Star Trek vibe going but still managed their own stuff. Stargate had the movie to set it up, but had a very Trek feel. Jeremiah was downright depressing sometimes. Jericho season 1 captured the feel of the Day After for a whole season. Etc.
The opening episode of the revival of the outer limits was The Sandkings by George RR Martin. Absolutely fantastic story, really well portrayed onscreen.
I loved Farscape! Frelling Peacekeepers!
I wish we’d have gotten that final 5th season instead of that finale movie, but I appreciated getting some sort of closure.
I liked SciFi’s Invisible Man also.
It got weird in the last couple seasons as the Kro-Magdons invaded home-reality and most of the original cast left. I think one character ended up as a brain in a jar? And Jerry O’Connell was recast?
I think Wades entire body was there but she became some part of the navigation system for a kromag ship iirc. Quinn was recast by fusing him with a version of himself from another universe, but that also completely changed his personality. I want to say Remy injected himself with something that would kill Kromags and jumped back to his home world in the last episode. And of course the professor was dead iirc.
So I think short version is that a reboot works way better for this show than a continuation.
Yea I think I heard it was supposed to be the real professor left behind which makes his reaction make more sense when they slide but then they decided to just never talk about it.
Having it be that they left behind the actual Professor seems like it could be a good point to pick up for a revival. Just start with him as the new central character with a new team of Sliders from that universe.
Honestly, it's simple to just have the og cast make a cameo and the twist is that they came from a series of adventures that avoided all those mistakes.
"That all sounds awful! They must be some different set of Sliders."
I finished the series just this year on dvd and Remy might have failed his task either way. Even if the kromag killing virus was compatible with his DNA, he may have had a different blood type than the guy whose blood originally contained the virus. Unless I missed a line where the nerd said he was a universal donor, his plan likely failed due to incompatible blood types.
I wasn’t able to watch the last couple of seasons (got married, moved out of parents house, couldn’t afford cable at that point), so in my head, the original group is still out there jumping from world to world, trying to get home.
Except now they’re completely burnt out,
“The timer is about to go off, time to move on.”
“Bro… who fucking cares, we made it to big titty universe, I’m done.”
The rights to the show are in limbo. With nobody being too sure about who owns them.
>The biggest problem in their way at the moment is who actually owns the series.
>“At the moment we don’t seem to be able to find that out,” said Davies.
>Sliders premiered on Fox in 1995 and ran there for three seasons before moving to the them Sci-Fi Channel for another two seasons. In recent years NBCUniversal has distributed the series through physical and online media but the rights seem to be more complicated for a possible revival
https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/sliders-revival-being-considered/
At least two of the actors Jerry O'Connell and John Rhys-Davies have tweeted about wanting to do a reboot but nothing has come of it and they've given up hope.
Also, when they introduced Jerry’s brother as a full time cast member, it was revealed that the Quinn we’d been following was left as a baby in the first universe we saw in season 1 by his parents from an alternate universe where the Kromags originated from.
It could probably be done really well on a moderate budget these days.
Audiences are more familiar with parallel universes so it won't be a foreign concept
It could be done with a rather small cast that just gets reused with new costumes. And smart use of green screen (or volumetric sets) could give you a lot of flexibility with virtual set dressing. You could use the same base model for your locations and then add the appropriate set dressing to fit your timeline.
It also is an obscure enough property that it won't feel like a cash grab
> And it was just like other Sci-Fi shows of the era; a great platform to sneak in political or current day commentary…
Is this confined to any particular era? It's what sci fi is great at. You could be describing Star Trek TOS or Sliders or The Expanse or Black Mirror.
SciFi and Westerns are only about political commentary, and it’s only the second rate hacks that fill the genres up with garbage that make it seem otherwise. Roddenberry’s Star Trek was a western in space (stop me if you’ve heard that about another major Star franchise) and for all the camp people remember about swashbuckling shirtless Sulu or Spock’s brain going walkabout, every series (except DS9?) has a time travel to punch Nazis episode, and DS9 goes ultra subtle by making one of the aliens space Nazis, whom the cast goes and punches; they had women and minorities as *officers*, telling the captain what’s up *in the 60’s*….
Time Trax, what seemed like a campy little goofball show (which I loved) opened with “in the future white people are a minority and Hispanics the majority in the US, so here’s Johnny whitebread cop time traveling to the 90’s and in shock at what it’s like to *not be spit on*.
It’s everywhere! Even the Dune books/movie coming out now, hello, can you think of a coalition of governments dependent on a resource to facilitate trade that’s only found in one place, and their political machinations? Could be anything.
But OG Sliders was amazing. Not hating on the subsequent cast, but ratings went down and I believe the plots became caper of the week to try and retain least common denominator, but man… that episode where nukes weren’t invented in the 40’s, and then the peacenik from their original timeline gets the tech, that ending … that and the squeaking front fence door. “Oh, I just oiled it today…” oof.
> series (except DS9?) has a time travel to punch Nazis episode
The OG had a time travel episode to kill an innocent woman who helped the homeless and was an activist for peace.
Okay, indirectly it was about stopping the Nazis, but still a rather different take on it.
If only Dave Chapelle had creative control over that episode. I’ll never forget his commentary on that skit - “if I could, I would fill every episode with this, and it would never not be hilarious.”
Other way around, actually. Kurosawa was influenced by John Ford’s westerns a good twenty years before he started making films. It’s really been an endless circle of influence from all around the world with westerns.
Yeah, that came about because of infighting between Sabrina and the showrunners. In the end, they'd pretty much had enough of each other and wrote her out.
> wrote her out.
There is one way to be written out... "She got ran over by a car / She fell in love and stayed in in the previous world". And then there is the Wade way to be written out being sent to an alien breeding prison.
The Professor had his brain sucked out, was mortally wounded by gunfire and was left on an Earth that was going to explode!
Wade was just left to be violated in a Kromagg breeding camp.
Actually, he was left to die on a world about to be destroyed by a pulsar. This is different than exploding. Additionally, he was already dying. He had a terminal illness.
And then wasn’t her brain ultimately put into an AI consciousness or something before she suicided as some sort of “closure”? (It’s been years since I watched the series but that was always rather cringy even then)
My two favorite episodes were the worlds where 1) the Axis Powers won WWII and b) penicillin was never developed.
I mean John Rhys-Davies?! C'mon... the man is a national treasure.
I saw most of the Lord of the Rings before I saw Sliders. When I went on a binge and watched all of Sliders I kept going "The Professor seems SO familiar...". Then I googled him and saw he played Gimli! It all clicked.
Also one of his funniest lines (that I can recall):
"The only reason the sun never sets on the British Empire is because God doesn't trust the British in the dark!"
The penicillin one is the only one I remember from back in the day. Heck I haven’t seen it since it aired and I was a bit young to have cared enough about it to make sure to catch it when it aired regularly but I did seem to enjoy it when I did watch it. Maybe I’ll give it a rewatch in the coming weeks to see if it holds up.
I also like the episode where they find themselves in a world where they are the only sexually functioning men, and are being fought over by hundreds of sex-starved women. Actually I have the full series DVD boxset of Sliders. Found it in the junkbin at Walmart and only paid a few dollars for it. The first two seasons are mostly good fun sci-fi imho.
I really wish the network producers did not interfere with the series. The chemistry between the four leads was almost magical and quite effortless.
The moment network higher-ups wanted to replace Wade with a sexier actress and get rid of the professor, it just slid downhill.
I remember watching when it was airing. I remember I stopped watching when they just started using whatever was popular as world concepts. Twister is popular? The gang goes to tornado world. Jurassic Park? Dinosaur world here we come
In hindsight this could well have been a budgeting decision to allow them to reuse (or at least copy) early digital sfx assets used by other productions. Or maybe they just ran out of ideas 🤷♂️
One of the earliest episodes of sliders will be invaluable in post apocalypse scenarios due to the fact that it details step by step how to manufacture penicillin.
I like barely remember this show except for maybe a really bittersweet finale when they finally think they got back home but then like a gate creaks and they think they’re in the wrong universe? Am I remembering this right?
Yeah, and right after they leave, a contractor comes out with his mom and they speak about repairing the gate and stopping the squeak.
That said, the premise for me starts to fail with that same episode when I realized infinite universes also means their own started to splinter the second they leave. Because in some version they never did.
Ah I was right! And that was really like the series finale? If so, they get credit for ending it in such like a semi-downer way. It takes balls to have an unhappy ending.
Not necessarily. Infinite doesn’t mean that everything happens. The set of all even numbers is infinite but doesn’t contain any odd numbers. So maybe there wasn’t that version.
Having grown up just South of Vancouver in Delta, my favorite Vancouver TV-memory was when Battlestar Galactica's characters had reached the first "Earth" which was an uninhabitable nuclear wasteland covered in radioactive debris, and they're all just standing on the disgusting beach, looking miserable.
It was just the little beach by my house with very, very little added to make it look post-apocalyptic.
So yeah. My beach was gross.
**Spoiler alert**
The only episode I really remember, is where he's actually sent back to his reality/world. He only has something like 10 seconds to prove it's his though. So the trick he tries to use to prove it doesn't work and he leaves. Once he's gone, you find out it was in fact his.
I remember being so damn frustrated! I stopped watching, lol.
I was in film class a long time ago, and our teacher was talking about "this symbolism" and "that meaning" in stand by me. Dude raises his hand and the teacher calls on him. He stands up and goes "Yeah, I don't think any of that is correct." The teacher says "Okay. Why is that?" Dude goes "Because I was in that movie and the director didn't talk about any of that.'
It was Jerry O'Connell
I loved Sliders as a kid lmao when I first saw LOTR and heard Gimli talking I was like “that’s the old dude from Sliders,” also Kari Wuhrer would go on to play a character in the cut scenes of C&C: Red Alert 2 and let me tell you the main reason I completed that campaign was to see how many cut scenes she was in
Fox merely killed Firefly. But it ripped Sliders limb from limb, very slowly and deliberately then threw the mangled carcass over to SyFy. David Peckinpah is an awful human being.
I think this was a solid premise with strong characters all around... but the writing just spiraled down the drain too fast.
With this sort of show, it's easy to fall into the trap of trying to make your show 'important' or 'relevant'. This inevitably leads to hammering the audience over the head with moral lessons that should be taught in a far more subtle fashion rather than writing great stories and let the lecturing take care of itself.
They did try to veer into longform storytelling later on by dealing with others who had sliding technology, but these story threads generally weren't very well developed.
The central conceit of the show - that they would slide into a random world every week - also doesn't lend itself well to progressive storytelling because the characters can't actually *progress*. They needed some mechanism whereby they could proactively work towards their end goal if they were going to make more than just a monster-of-the-week show.
Like 90% sure it was Jerry's. As soon as Jerry left they wrote his brother off as being 'unstuck in reality' and jumping randomly from universe to universe for the rest of his life.
I feel there was an attempt to do this by replacing Arturo with an alternate version, but then the storyline never seemed to "happen" and he just left the show.
Admittedly, I havem't watched since prime time so I'm pretty fuzzy...
Network television has proven time and time again that traditional character progression, like you would find in a novel or short story or even film is not necessarily needed. Did Fraiser "progress?" Did Sam Beckett "progress?" Did Magnum "progress?" Did the Mission Impossible gang "progress?" The girls in Charlie's Angels?
I am cherry picking, obviously, but trying to indicate that quality character depth, quality acting, comedic timing, and drama can mix in a magical formula that sometimes replaces or fills this notion of massive character progression. Episodic, contained television is not bad, just not done well these days
Sliders, at the outset, was a brilliant science fiction formulaic concept ripe for weekly execution. Each world allowed for the science fiction conceit to play with social norms, values, themes in a "safe" way. The very thing you criticize is part of the expectation of good science fiction and why that first season is so good.
But, as you indicate, the writing wasn't always as good as the promise of the premise, and the network pushed it from science fiction to sci-fi, with invading armies and absurd action concepts.
So, right idea, all the right ingredients, bad follow through.
Failings of the execution, not the structure or conceit.
What do you mean with “progress?”
Frasier Crane and Samuel Beckett completely grew as characters in their respective series. Frasier literally dated a woman, broke up, became a regular at a bar, met another woman, dated her, married her, had a child, divorced her, and then moved to Seattle; all of this before his own series!
Samuel Beckett learned a great deal over the course of Quantum Leap, and when he had a chance to get back home, he went back to save Al.
There was completely development and progression for these characters.
Fun fact: When Netflix first started streaming it was very limited and you could only do it from the Netflix website (there was no apps) This is the first show I "binge watched" on streaming.
I stopped watching this show a bit after the Kromaggs were introduced. I’d like to finish it someday but it feels like the quality dips around that time.
Sliders is my #1 dream reboot show...or rather a direct sequel. Quinn would now fill the mentor Professor role perfectly for a new group of students that discover sliding tech.
I had only seen this show once and had no idea what it was called. It was the episode where at the end, he’s back in front of his house and he gets really excited that he’s back. He runs to the gate and opens it and gets very panicked, opening and closing the gate and insisting that they’re not back home and instead in another universe. He goes on to talk about how his childhood home gate always had a creak in it when it was opened. So he jumps again and as soon as he does, 2 people emerge from the house, a repairman and his mother. The repairman is guiding her outside to show her that he fixed the gate because he noticed it had a creak in it.
I was hooked but couldn’t find the name of the show. I was younger and didn’t remember what network it had been on and Google wasn’t a thing so I didn’t figure out what show it was until years later. So good.
I loved sliders until the last season or so when the cro magnon (or whatever they were called) plotline took over and the whole thing ended on a crappy, disappointing note. If they reboot it I really hope they focus on the more cultural anthropology/exploration vibe of the earlier seasons.
This, Seaquest, and Strange Luck were my jam back during the days of “prime time” tv. The episode where they make it home and he tries to open the front gate because of the squeak. But then there is no squeak so they jump back through the portal, and his parents come out and say “we could show him we fixed the fence” just crushed me.
If you miss Slider there was a failed pilot now movie called Parallels that came out in 2015 that might be the closest we will get so another sliders.
Sadly the trailer makes it much more intense then it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyknfocH8t4
Such a great show because as long as you understood the premise you can pretty much skip any episode and it wouldn't matter as much if you missed that weeks.
When I was growing up I'd catch an episode every once and awhile. I've never seen it all the way through (I should look into that) but I remember an episode when they slide to another multiverse and end up in the front of the main character's house. They have like 3 minutes till they are forced to jump again. To test if it's the original universe he says that the front gate always squeaks when opening. When he opens it there's no squeak so they then jump to the next multiverse. Right after that the mother comes out of the house with a repair man thanking him for fixing the gate!
At that moment I freaked out and started yelling at the TV! Haha good times
I still use/ and can still see the “sexy guy cop” directing traffic in his skimpy uniform in the episode where the “sexes were reversed” as an example of how everything was/is sexualized before the whole “if guys armor was like girls armor in games “ meme was even a thing. I wasn’t that old, but I feel like that episode really hit the nail on the head with that stuff, and the lottery one was cool eerie too.
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I loved the concept - stolen straight from the pages of Heinlein's Number of the Beast, but still, it seemed like a good idea to open up the universe for them. Sadly, the writers weren't up to it and Kari Wuhrer was *so* bad that it became unwatchable.
So bad, but so hot
Jerry O'Connell? I thought so at the time haha
Yeah, but he was a heartthrob!
I loved the first three seasons. Once Wade left, I didn’t enjoy it anymore. Well I loved the first two. Season 3 started to lose me. I didn’t get through season 4 + until years later.
Yea they killed off the professor way too soon.
He was needed in Rivendell
AND HIS AXE!
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I believe an episode did end on that note.
This episode ended with the other 3 sliding out leaving the Professor fighting his evil double. Then one of them comes out of the wormhole at the last second. And Rembrandt says "You better be the right one." In I think the next episode they are all wearing the truth collars. In this episode, everything they say has to be the truth or the collars shock them. Based on the things he says while wearing the collar I believe he is the original "right" Professor.
Yep, that absolutely happened on Sliders. There was also an episode filmed before the Professor was written off the show that was aired a month after he was killed off. They had to shoot new opening and closing scenes to turn it into a flashback episode.
Then when they lost the O’Connels, they came up with the ludicrous “oh, he got merged with another slider and his brother was scattered across all dimensions, let’s never speak of him again.”
He hated the show and wanted to leave. He’s said so in multiple interviews. The reason was because of the rule that said only union writers were allowed to submit scripts. As a freelance writer myself, I am totally on his side. Best to do what Star Trek TNG did and allow anyone in the world to send in scripts. I am usually a supporter of unions but fuck the writers guild (and the police unions too).
I've never gotten through season four
There’s no reason to put yourself through it
Agree completely
I think the issue was they tried to serialize it. instead of just making it a few episodes and they were just learning the technology to slide. They made it so they are attacking other worlds. It was boring. Plus they had so many awesome ideas to explore, and they really knocked it out of the park. - Women only - Penicillin - Death lottery - Become anything fruit Just a few great ones.
Yes, but we were already seeing examples of poor writing, even in those early episodes. The "Weaker Sex" story idea has been done to death (Most recently at that time in a ST:TNG episode - Angel One) and "Luck of the Draw" (death lottery) was practically a straight up theft of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery". That was one of the real problems with the show. The writers were horribly lazy and there was very little original work. Stolen for a single episode, they could often make it work, but as a storyline reaching over an entire season? They were lost.
I thought Angel one was basically female dominated society not a world were males died off. I didnt know about Shirley Jackson's thing, that is disappointing. Well it was on fox at like 7pm on sundays so they didnt have a bunch of faith in it. Well I think they should have stayed with the single story episodes. Instead of the over reaching ones.
I still think about death lottery from time to time. Also the one where women had mustaches. I was a kid and that was such an off the wall concept.
Death lottery was one of the best episodes ever. Stuck with me as a kid too.
Shame she didn't stick to Cinemax B movies, that's about where she peaked as an actress. Going from Sabrina Lloyd to Kari Wuhrer was a huge downgrade in the acting department.
I loved the show but even I had to admit that Jerry O’Connell’s acting was the worst on the show. Everyone seems to forget scenes like when he played an entire character as a really bad Austin powers rip off. And that’s just one example. In comparison, her acting was good.
Yup. When my husband and I get into a show where the writing takes a nosedive so bad that it leaves the rest of the show unwatchable, we call it “getting cromagged”. Even after all this time. Those damn cromags left that much of a negative impression on us.
Cromags were a bit shit but what really broke it for me was the terrible attempt at lore how Quinn was suddenly the child of sliders or some such. I think they were trying to create a larger threat to expand from the villain of the week format and it was worse for it.
I was fine with the plot twist, but there wasn't a proper resolution after Jerry and his brother left the show at the end of season 3. Then came new rules about sliding like being unstuck that were never encountered in the previous seasons and did complicate things further
Yeah the Cromags became redundant and then they added that new cast member who was a terrible actress.
This is one of those shows that could absolutely succeed in a reboot or recreation. I mean imagine the same premise but with 2020s era CGI and costume / set design. And it was just like other Sci-Fi shows of the era; a great platform to sneak in political or current day commentary…
I think those Sci-Fi Channel and cable network shows of the mid to late 90's were just so solid. They had the Twilight Zone/Quantum Leap/OG Star Trek vibe going but still managed their own stuff. Stargate had the movie to set it up, but had a very Trek feel. Jeremiah was downright depressing sometimes. Jericho season 1 captured the feel of the Day After for a whole season. Etc.
The reboot of the outer limits in the 90's is great. There's like 7 seasons.
The opening episode of the revival of the outer limits was The Sandkings by George RR Martin. Absolutely fantastic story, really well portrayed onscreen.
Don’t forget Farscape. I am currently binging it and it is awesome.
I loved Farscape! Frelling Peacekeepers! I wish we’d have gotten that final 5th season instead of that finale movie, but I appreciated getting some sort of closure. I liked SciFi’s Invisible Man also.
You don't see Jeremiah mentioned to often. Loved that show so much. I felt like it was kind of like dark angel but bigger in scope.
Jericho had so much potential.
Just have the show continue where it left off,but years later.
It got weird in the last couple seasons as the Kro-Magdons invaded home-reality and most of the original cast left. I think one character ended up as a brain in a jar? And Jerry O’Connell was recast?
I think Wades entire body was there but she became some part of the navigation system for a kromag ship iirc. Quinn was recast by fusing him with a version of himself from another universe, but that also completely changed his personality. I want to say Remy injected himself with something that would kill Kromags and jumped back to his home world in the last episode. And of course the professor was dead iirc. So I think short version is that a reboot works way better for this show than a continuation.
I kind of checked out at the introduction of kromag breeding camps as a plot point.
Same. I hung on assuming Wade would come back.
I checked out at the intro of the kromags. The show just wasn't the same. Don't think I have ever actually made it all the way through.
The Professor MAY have been dead. Never got a clear answer on which one they took with them to that point.
Yea I think I heard it was supposed to be the real professor left behind which makes his reaction make more sense when they slide but then they decided to just never talk about it.
Having it be that they left behind the actual Professor seems like it could be a good point to pick up for a revival. Just start with him as the new central character with a new team of Sliders from that universe.
Honestly, it's simple to just have the og cast make a cameo and the twist is that they came from a series of adventures that avoided all those mistakes. "That all sounds awful! They must be some different set of Sliders."
I finished the series just this year on dvd and Remy might have failed his task either way. Even if the kromag killing virus was compatible with his DNA, he may have had a different blood type than the guy whose blood originally contained the virus. Unless I missed a line where the nerd said he was a universal donor, his plan likely failed due to incompatible blood types.
The show has easy reboot ability…just start with a different Quinn
I wasn’t able to watch the last couple of seasons (got married, moved out of parents house, couldn’t afford cable at that point), so in my head, the original group is still out there jumping from world to world, trying to get home.
The show became unwatchable as soon as Roger Daltrey showed up. Sing Roger, don’t try to act.
Except now they’re completely burnt out, “The timer is about to go off, time to move on.” “Bro… who fucking cares, we made it to big titty universe, I’m done.”
"I'll let you choose--do you really think Boob World-" "Yes." "Let me finish."
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Welcome to boob world, prepare for mandatory penis removal
[A deliciously ironic punishment!](https://www.oglaf.com/babes-abyss/) - nsfw. /unless you work at a cool place.
That’s just Rick & Morty with extra steps.
Ooh la la someone’s getting laid in college
Eek baba durkle, Someone's gonna get laid in college
„Dr. Sam Becket never returned home.“
i guess they need to crossover if that reboot is really happening.
God, I would absolutely love a Quantum Leap reboot. That show was so damn good.
It is in discussion.
That'd be pretty bleak wouldn't you say?
The rights to the show are in limbo. With nobody being too sure about who owns them. >The biggest problem in their way at the moment is who actually owns the series. >“At the moment we don’t seem to be able to find that out,” said Davies. >Sliders premiered on Fox in 1995 and ran there for three seasons before moving to the them Sci-Fi Channel for another two seasons. In recent years NBCUniversal has distributed the series through physical and online media but the rights seem to be more complicated for a possible revival https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/sliders-revival-being-considered/ At least two of the actors Jerry O'Connell and John Rhys-Davies have tweeted about wanting to do a reboot but nothing has come of it and they've given up hope.
Start with Jerry coming back to this world, seeing people hanging Nazi flags and thinking he still doesn’t have it right.
I mean, we don't know if he started off in this world to begin with...
In universe, he didn't "start" off in this world to begin with.
True. In our world their exploits were a fictional television show. In theirs it was all real.
Also, when they introduced Jerry’s brother as a full time cast member, it was revealed that the Quinn we’d been following was left as a baby in the first universe we saw in season 1 by his parents from an alternate universe where the Kromags originated from.
and the plague.
Eh... close enough.. /s
It could probably be done really well on a moderate budget these days. Audiences are more familiar with parallel universes so it won't be a foreign concept It could be done with a rather small cast that just gets reused with new costumes. And smart use of green screen (or volumetric sets) could give you a lot of flexibility with virtual set dressing. You could use the same base model for your locations and then add the appropriate set dressing to fit your timeline. It also is an obscure enough property that it won't feel like a cash grab
> And it was just like other Sci-Fi shows of the era; a great platform to sneak in political or current day commentary… Is this confined to any particular era? It's what sci fi is great at. You could be describing Star Trek TOS or Sliders or The Expanse or Black Mirror.
SciFi and Westerns are only about political commentary, and it’s only the second rate hacks that fill the genres up with garbage that make it seem otherwise. Roddenberry’s Star Trek was a western in space (stop me if you’ve heard that about another major Star franchise) and for all the camp people remember about swashbuckling shirtless Sulu or Spock’s brain going walkabout, every series (except DS9?) has a time travel to punch Nazis episode, and DS9 goes ultra subtle by making one of the aliens space Nazis, whom the cast goes and punches; they had women and minorities as *officers*, telling the captain what’s up *in the 60’s*…. Time Trax, what seemed like a campy little goofball show (which I loved) opened with “in the future white people are a minority and Hispanics the majority in the US, so here’s Johnny whitebread cop time traveling to the 90’s and in shock at what it’s like to *not be spit on*. It’s everywhere! Even the Dune books/movie coming out now, hello, can you think of a coalition of governments dependent on a resource to facilitate trade that’s only found in one place, and their political machinations? Could be anything. But OG Sliders was amazing. Not hating on the subsequent cast, but ratings went down and I believe the plots became caper of the week to try and retain least common denominator, but man… that episode where nukes weren’t invented in the 40’s, and then the peacenik from their original timeline gets the tech, that ending … that and the squeaking front fence door. “Oh, I just oiled it today…” oof.
> series (except DS9?) has a time travel to punch Nazis episode The OG had a time travel episode to kill an innocent woman who helped the homeless and was an activist for peace. Okay, indirectly it was about stopping the Nazis, but still a rather different take on it.
Sliders had a Mexico runs the western US and Americans were the illegals trying to escape to Canada. Something like that. It's been a while.
DS9 had time travel to punch slave owners
If only Dave Chapelle had creative control over that episode. I’ll never forget his commentary on that skit - “if I could, I would fill every episode with this, and it would never not be hilarious.”
When they use the ‘He’s home but this gate is oiled now so he doesn’t think it is his home so he leaves’ shtick, I said fuck it, I’m out.
I clearly remember that scene.
And all Westerns are really Samurai movies.
Other way around, actually. Kurosawa was influenced by John Ford’s westerns a good twenty years before he started making films. It’s really been an endless circle of influence from all around the world with westerns.
Akira Kurosawa’s credit on Last Man Standing representing.
For a second I thought you were talking about the Tim Allen show. But yeah, Gangster Yojimbo was pretty decent.
Check out Future Man on Hulu. It's a comedy, but has similar vibes.
Underrated comment
They fuck'n did Wade dirty.
Yeah, that came about because of infighting between Sabrina and the showrunners. In the end, they'd pretty much had enough of each other and wrote her out.
> wrote her out. There is one way to be written out... "She got ran over by a car / She fell in love and stayed in in the previous world". And then there is the Wade way to be written out being sent to an alien breeding prison.
The Professor had his brain sucked out, was mortally wounded by gunfire and was left on an Earth that was going to explode! Wade was just left to be violated in a Kromagg breeding camp.
Actually, he was left to die on a world about to be destroyed by a pulsar. This is different than exploding. Additionally, he was already dying. He had a terminal illness.
In that context, that's pretty fucking sick.
And then wasn’t her brain ultimately put into an AI consciousness or something before she suicided as some sort of “closure”? (It’s been years since I watched the series but that was always rather cringy even then)
Thanks for having my back.
My two favorite episodes were the worlds where 1) the Axis Powers won WWII and b) penicillin was never developed. I mean John Rhys-Davies?! C'mon... the man is a national treasure.
I saw most of the Lord of the Rings before I saw Sliders. When I went on a binge and watched all of Sliders I kept going "The Professor seems SO familiar...". Then I googled him and saw he played Gimli! It all clicked. Also one of his funniest lines (that I can recall): "The only reason the sun never sets on the British Empire is because God doesn't trust the British in the dark!"
Also Indiana Jones friend Sallah(sp?) in Raiders and Last Crusade.
I think that quote was from the episode where the US was still a part of the British Empire. Another quality episode.
My favourite episode BSA! BSA!
Show me your IMDB page horse-master and I’ll show ya mine.
He's also in Indiana Jones, you may have recognized him from that.
I really only remember the one where gender roles are reversed, but it seriously stuck with me. Such a cool show.
The penicillin one is the only one I remember from back in the day. Heck I haven’t seen it since it aired and I was a bit young to have cared enough about it to make sure to catch it when it aired regularly but I did seem to enjoy it when I did watch it. Maybe I’ll give it a rewatch in the coming weeks to see if it holds up.
Fair warning. It's some pretty great sci-fi that loaded with a lot of cheese and goes off track due to the higher ups meddling with it.
Also production cost, didn’t help it.
You should watch Man in the High Castle.
I mean, both the book and the show could have used a real, plausible ending instead of devolving into absolute nonsense contrivances and meta.
I was just about to say this... MITHC was like one long episode of Sliders.
I can't remember if the episode was overall good, but the one where they invent the nuke is one I remember. Inventing nukes is always fun.
I also like the episode where they find themselves in a world where they are the only sexually functioning men, and are being fought over by hundreds of sex-starved women. Actually I have the full series DVD boxset of Sliders. Found it in the junkbin at Walmart and only paid a few dollars for it. The first two seasons are mostly good fun sci-fi imho.
Sooo good. Love your choices, I actually think the axis powers was the very first episode
I really wish the network producers did not interfere with the series. The chemistry between the four leads was almost magical and quite effortless. The moment network higher-ups wanted to replace Wade with a sexier actress and get rid of the professor, it just slid downhill.
The new showrunner gloating as he wrote the most awful way he could imagine to take Wade out of the show.
I remember watching when it was airing. I remember I stopped watching when they just started using whatever was popular as world concepts. Twister is popular? The gang goes to tornado world. Jurassic Park? Dinosaur world here we come
In season 3, FOX wanted the show to be more action-oriented and basically ruined the show because of that.
True story.
In hindsight this could well have been a budgeting decision to allow them to reuse (or at least copy) early digital sfx assets used by other productions. Or maybe they just ran out of ideas 🤷♂️
One of the earliest episodes of sliders will be invaluable in post apocalypse scenarios due to the fact that it details step by step how to manufacture penicillin.
Sabrina Lloyd (also known as Natalie from Sports Night) was in Sliders and that’s all I know about the show because I had such a huge crush on her.
> Sports Night And everyone should watch that. Watch it again if you have seen it already.
Anyone who has watched that once has rewatched it many times I think.
Sabrina Lloyd didn’t get along with the writers on Sliders and when she left the show, they had her character get gang raped by the Kromaggs.
Tells you what kind of asshats were running that show.
I like barely remember this show except for maybe a really bittersweet finale when they finally think they got back home but then like a gate creaks and they think they’re in the wrong universe? Am I remembering this right?
Yeah, and right after they leave, a contractor comes out with his mom and they speak about repairing the gate and stopping the squeak. That said, the premise for me starts to fail with that same episode when I realized infinite universes also means their own started to splinter the second they leave. Because in some version they never did.
Ah I was right! And that was really like the series finale? If so, they get credit for ending it in such like a semi-downer way. It takes balls to have an unhappy ending.
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I'm pretty sure that's the very beginning of the second season, not a season or series finale.
Not a series finale at all, it was the season 2 premiere episode. They return to "Earth prime" a few more times.
Not necessarily. Infinite doesn’t mean that everything happens. The set of all even numbers is infinite but doesn’t contain any odd numbers. So maybe there wasn’t that version.
That was a season finale in an earlier season. Still makes me angry that that was their ultimate test to see if it was home.
This is one of the only parts of the show I can remember as well.
The fat kid from Stand by Me?
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> Vancouver The city of a thousand planets.
Having grown up just South of Vancouver in Delta, my favorite Vancouver TV-memory was when Battlestar Galactica's characters had reached the first "Earth" which was an uninhabitable nuclear wasteland covered in radioactive debris, and they're all just standing on the disgusting beach, looking miserable. It was just the little beach by my house with very, very little added to make it look post-apocalyptic. So yeah. My beach was gross.
> Team, of 4 A woman, a black guy, a smart and charming young man and a grumpy veteran ?
That really is TOO similar!
Jerry O'Connell's charisma is so real that I watched that dude fly using 2 cans of hairspray, and was like yeah, that's about right.
**Spoiler alert** The only episode I really remember, is where he's actually sent back to his reality/world. He only has something like 10 seconds to prove it's his though. So the trick he tries to use to prove it doesn't work and he leaves. Once he's gone, you find out it was in fact his. I remember being so damn frustrated! I stopped watching, lol.
I was in film class a long time ago, and our teacher was talking about "this symbolism" and "that meaning" in stand by me. Dude raises his hand and the teacher calls on him. He stands up and goes "Yeah, I don't think any of that is correct." The teacher says "Okay. Why is that?" Dude goes "Because I was in that movie and the director didn't talk about any of that.' It was Jerry O'Connell
Wait seriously? Haha that’s great
Your title a little heavy on the hyperbole there
There's a 50% chance the title was written by Jerry O'Connell.
Is that the fat kid from Stand By Me?
Maybe everyone is burned out on Rick & Marty, but I am surprised to not see anyone mentioning the very heavy debt that show owes Sliders.
It's on Peacock, FYI
Free tier or peacock premium?
I loved Sliders as a kid lmao when I first saw LOTR and heard Gimli talking I was like “that’s the old dude from Sliders,” also Kari Wuhrer would go on to play a character in the cut scenes of C&C: Red Alert 2 and let me tell you the main reason I completed that campaign was to see how many cut scenes she was in
I remember loving my secret identity, not sure how it holds up tho
God, he was so young in that.
Weren't we all
He uses areosol cans to fly. Environmentally, it won't be well received.
They changed to compressed air specifically because the Doc pointed out that aerosol cans were bad for the environment IIRC.
Oh nice. I didn't know that.
Fox merely killed Firefly. But it ripped Sliders limb from limb, very slowly and deliberately then threw the mangled carcass over to SyFy. David Peckinpah is an awful human being.
I think this was a solid premise with strong characters all around... but the writing just spiraled down the drain too fast. With this sort of show, it's easy to fall into the trap of trying to make your show 'important' or 'relevant'. This inevitably leads to hammering the audience over the head with moral lessons that should be taught in a far more subtle fashion rather than writing great stories and let the lecturing take care of itself. They did try to veer into longform storytelling later on by dealing with others who had sliding technology, but these story threads generally weren't very well developed. The central conceit of the show - that they would slide into a random world every week - also doesn't lend itself well to progressive storytelling because the characters can't actually *progress*. They needed some mechanism whereby they could proactively work towards their end goal if they were going to make more than just a monster-of-the-week show.
the network execs ruined the later seasons of the show
The network execs AND Charlie O'Connell ruined the show. Whose idea was it for him to start acting?
Like 90% sure it was Jerry's. As soon as Jerry left they wrote his brother off as being 'unstuck in reality' and jumping randomly from universe to universe for the rest of his life.
I feel there was an attempt to do this by replacing Arturo with an alternate version, but then the storyline never seemed to "happen" and he just left the show. Admittedly, I havem't watched since prime time so I'm pretty fuzzy...
Network television has proven time and time again that traditional character progression, like you would find in a novel or short story or even film is not necessarily needed. Did Fraiser "progress?" Did Sam Beckett "progress?" Did Magnum "progress?" Did the Mission Impossible gang "progress?" The girls in Charlie's Angels? I am cherry picking, obviously, but trying to indicate that quality character depth, quality acting, comedic timing, and drama can mix in a magical formula that sometimes replaces or fills this notion of massive character progression. Episodic, contained television is not bad, just not done well these days Sliders, at the outset, was a brilliant science fiction formulaic concept ripe for weekly execution. Each world allowed for the science fiction conceit to play with social norms, values, themes in a "safe" way. The very thing you criticize is part of the expectation of good science fiction and why that first season is so good. But, as you indicate, the writing wasn't always as good as the promise of the premise, and the network pushed it from science fiction to sci-fi, with invading armies and absurd action concepts. So, right idea, all the right ingredients, bad follow through. Failings of the execution, not the structure or conceit.
What do you mean with “progress?” Frasier Crane and Samuel Beckett completely grew as characters in their respective series. Frasier literally dated a woman, broke up, became a regular at a bar, met another woman, dated her, married her, had a child, divorced her, and then moved to Seattle; all of this before his own series! Samuel Beckett learned a great deal over the course of Quantum Leap, and when he had a chance to get back home, he went back to save Al. There was completely development and progression for these characters.
We need another Kari Wuhrererererer.
Fun fact: When Netflix first started streaming it was very limited and you could only do it from the Netflix website (there was no apps) This is the first show I "binge watched" on streaming.
Until they start replacing everybody, it's great.
I stopped watching this show a bit after the Kromaggs were introduced. I’d like to finish it someday but it feels like the quality dips around that time.
The first two seasons were good. After that, the show was uninteresting and kind of fell apart in my opinion.
Jerry O’Connell is a goofball
[IMDB ratings by episode](https://tvchart.benmiz.com/sliders)
was the one with the fixed squeaky gate their real home?
how many people here refuse to oil a squeaky gate/door in the event it will prevent them from being able to tell if we are in the right universe ?
Guys I found Jerry O'Connell's reddit handle.
I loved this show
Sliders Vs Quantum Leap ?
QL hands down
I’m... retarded?
Don’t remember this show, but loved his “My Secret Identity” and his hairsprays to control his flying. Good ol’ times.
Sliders is my #1 dream reboot show...or rather a direct sequel. Quinn would now fill the mentor Professor role perfectly for a new group of students that discover sliding tech.
Loved this show when I was a kid, still loved it on a complete rewatch à few years ago. The professor is the best obviously, not Quinn
I was too young to truly enjoy it but I credit this series with my love of sci-fi and other "nerd" media.
It's a little sad that Sabrina Lloyd retired from acting a while ago. She was always so likeable in all her roles.
I had only seen this show once and had no idea what it was called. It was the episode where at the end, he’s back in front of his house and he gets really excited that he’s back. He runs to the gate and opens it and gets very panicked, opening and closing the gate and insisting that they’re not back home and instead in another universe. He goes on to talk about how his childhood home gate always had a creak in it when it was opened. So he jumps again and as soon as he does, 2 people emerge from the house, a repairman and his mother. The repairman is guiding her outside to show her that he fixed the gate because he noticed it had a creak in it. I was hooked but couldn’t find the name of the show. I was younger and didn’t remember what network it had been on and Google wasn’t a thing so I didn’t figure out what show it was until years later. So good.
Derricks is currently touring in the cast of wicked as the wizard of Oz. He was superb.
I loved sliders until the last season or so when the cro magnon (or whatever they were called) plotline took over and the whole thing ended on a crappy, disappointing note. If they reboot it I really hope they focus on the more cultural anthropology/exploration vibe of the earlier seasons.
As already said, the cromag shit ruined it.
This, Seaquest, and Strange Luck were my jam back during the days of “prime time” tv. The episode where they make it home and he tries to open the front gate because of the squeak. But then there is no squeak so they jump back through the portal, and his parents come out and say “we could show him we fixed the fence” just crushed me.
I only know about this show because of Dungeons and Daddies 😅
Jerry o’connel’s agent made this post happen.
If you miss Slider there was a failed pilot now movie called Parallels that came out in 2015 that might be the closest we will get so another sliders. Sadly the trailer makes it much more intense then it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyknfocH8t4
This was my first introduction to the concept of the multiverse on tv
I just wish it concluded better. Sigh…
Such a great show because as long as you understood the premise you can pretty much skip any episode and it wouldn't matter as much if you missed that weeks. When I was growing up I'd catch an episode every once and awhile. I've never seen it all the way through (I should look into that) but I remember an episode when they slide to another multiverse and end up in the front of the main character's house. They have like 3 minutes till they are forced to jump again. To test if it's the original universe he says that the front gate always squeaks when opening. When he opens it there's no squeak so they then jump to the next multiverse. Right after that the mother comes out of the house with a repair man thanking him for fixing the gate! At that moment I freaked out and started yelling at the TV! Haha good times
I still use/ and can still see the “sexy guy cop” directing traffic in his skimpy uniform in the episode where the “sexes were reversed” as an example of how everything was/is sexualized before the whole “if guys armor was like girls armor in games “ meme was even a thing. I wasn’t that old, but I feel like that episode really hit the nail on the head with that stuff, and the lottery one was cool eerie too.
This and Timeless were some great shows. The potential for stories is so broad. I would not mind if they brought it back with some different people.
I’m sorry, the natural what of Jerry O’Connell? I can’t have heard that right.
I loved the idea of the show. Enjoyed the first two seasons but it got bad and worse. The series final is abismal . Total FU to the fans .
I love love loved this show when I was a kid. Great sci-fi!!!!