Tag: Sliders

Does anyone remember this Fox and then SyFy Channel show from the 1990’s? The show ran from 1995 to 2000.

I remember this show in the nineties but I never once saw an episode back then. I  like science fiction a lot but for some reason I never tuned in. Lately I have been able to watch this show and after a couple of seasons it started to grow on me. Then during the last part of the 3rd season it started to go downhill rapidly and by the 4 – 5th season the whole thing changed.

The plot was that a young genius Quinn Mallory creates a device that opens portals to alternative realities. After an accident leaves them lost, Mallory and his companions: his physics professor, Professor Maximillian Arturo, his work colleague and potential love, Wade Wells, and a once famous soul singer, Rembrandt Brown, “slide” from reality to reality in search of home. They go to parallel worlds where things did not develop like our world. One world Kennedy may not have been killed, the other one penicillin not invented, and etc… They don’t travel in time though…just a different earth in the same decade and time.

I’ve read up on it and as usual…the network was the culprit. Trying to appeal to the “MTV Generation” they changed the show dramatically. By the end of the 5th season only one original slider was left. They ended up doing away with all of the original characters and even the one that survived (Cleavant Derricks) til the 5th season probably would not have made it to the 6th if there had been a 6th.

The show had decent ratings but Fox couldn’t help themselves and messed around with the show and show runner at that time…Tracy Torme.  Starting in the 3rd season newer writers started to rip off movie ideas and put them in the show. Shakespearean actor John Rhys-Davies knew what kind of potential the show had and complained loudly about the awful scripts…he was the first to go…after Sabrina Lloyd left, the lead actor Jerry O’Connell soon quit

On top of everything else the network would air the action episodes first and therefore air them all out of order…so when they went into a new world they would be dressed differently than the episode that was shown before…because that could have been coming from a world in a future episode or one two or three back.

I’m very surprised that no one has rebooted this series. The possibilities are endless with that plot. Like the recent movie “Yesterday” it showed a world where  The Beatles never existed and how the world had changed.

It was cool to see what worlds they would land in…each history was like ours except for a few things…like one episode where the British had won the war.

Has anyone seen it and what do you  think of it?

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