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The people I know aren't really 'names.' They've stood at a cash register in a Whole Foods commercial, sang the jingle for pizza chain commercials, etc.. To have leading roles, they write and perform in their own stageplays.

I imagine there'd have been a contractual hold on the CANARIES cast for some period of time following the ARROW finale. I suspect that any contractual hold on Kat McNamara has not expired yet as Pedowitz said discussions are ongoing regarding CANARIES.

If it expires (and it will in the coming months), I suppose the network and studio could ask for an extension given the extraordinary circumstances, but Grant Gustin said that he'd been engaged in negotiations for Season 7 only for those negotiations to stop dead when the pandemic hit -- which means that if that hold expires, there probably won't be any further motion until after the pandemic, assuming that there is any after. I think McNamara would be happy to wait for CANARIES up to a point since she's a working class TV actress with an established career in playing action girls and headlining a CW superhero show would be a very sensible next step in her career. She wants to do CANARIES.

Well, hopefully, she’ll wait. Every time I see Kat descend from a jump line and land with her bow and arrow at the ready, I feel an uncontrollable, incontestable urge to go workout and only eat fat and protein and fibre. My health would benefit greatly if GREEN ARROW AND THE CANARIES went to series.

I am currently deep in watching WAREHOUSE 13, but if DEVS isn’t as dark and scary as the real world, I’d watch it. Is it?

Right now, I am also watching PARKS AND RECREATION, a fantasy show where American government is run by engaged, capable or at least not malevolent people. And CASTLE and WAREHOUSE 13, where people who work in American establishment institutions are capable of doing their jobs. You know. Fantasy.

I haven't really been keeping up with SUPERNATURAL and am not familiar with this show. But I've now found another account indicating that SUPERNATURAL was abruptly cancelled in the middle of Season 6 after recurring actor Mischa Collins was murdered in a Vancouver alleyway and then a guest-actor went on an inexplicable shooting spree during which he murdered series creator and former showrunner Erik Kripke and lead actors Jensen Ackles and Jared Padelecki were too traumatized to resume filming, meaning SUPERNATURAL abruptly ended with episode 14 of Season 6 and the CW posthumously aired Kripke's OCTOCOBRA in his honour.

There was a high school musical sequel that the CW indifferently permitted to be performed. This production wrapped up the series satisfactorily, but it was, as I recall, written by a fan who dashed it off in a fugue writing state and it involved musical solos and aliens and there were some scenes involving rock star vampires, fat craving zombies, breeder parasites, killer robots, dinosaurs, dragons and remote controlled cars that shoot laser cannons or I may have confused that with some other fan fiction sequel.

CW head Mark Pedowitz has said that discussions regarding GREEN ARROW AND THE CANARIES are still ongoing, so he hasn't pulled the plug yet.
https://www.eonline.com/ca/news/1151970 … cw-for-now

*gapes at Temporal Flux*

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR was... unpopular... ? Ultimate Reed becoming a villain was... good?

TF is making me wonder if I am completely out of step with superhero comics now which, I admit, I don't read too often. I tend to let things pile up for a few years on Comixology and then catch up. I read everything between AVENGERS VS. X-MEN and HOUSE OF X last month.

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR was a neat reimagining of the team with Reed as a gifted teenager drafted into a US Army think tank in New York City with Sue Storm as a scientist, Johnny tagging along just for the hell of it and Ben as the only friend Reed had from childhood. Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis did (I thought) a great job of updating the 60s team for the 2000s by making everyone (a) teenagers and (b) working for a US Army weapons farm and Reed and Sue accidentally turning themselves and two innocent bystanders into superweapons. Millar's action-oriented set pieces and Bendis' hilarious dialogue were (I thought) a winning combination for the first arc.

Then came Warren Ellis, who brought his brilliant hard science approach into exploring how Mr. Fantastic stretches. How the Invisible Woman manipulates the molecular structure of her body. How the Human Torch can ignite. And how Ben is basically immortal now. Ellis had several great arcs and after a fill-in with the equally clever Mike Carey, we had Mark Millar bring his crazy action lunacy back to the team as he advanced the characters from operating within a secret branch of the army to existing as independent superheroes (and brought in the Marvel Zombies). Then Mike Carey came back again with some exciting extradimensional adventures that brought the crazy Kirby adventure with the youth of the Ultimate FF.

It was very much the energy of SLIDERS with the sci-fi creativity of Douglas Adams and the humour of David Mamet -- but now that I think about it, maybe it wasn't that popular because Marvel ended up blowing it all apart with that weird ULTIMATUM crossover that massacred the X-Men and the Ultimate Avengers and blew up the Fantastic Four's headquarters and had the team break up.

I guess Marvel wouldn't have blown the team apart if the book had been selling well.

Then came that very odd ULTIMATE ENEMY series where Reed killed his parents and sister and attacked the Earth with his new alien allies and became a crazy supervillain, a bizarre turn of character that was completely at odds with the gentle, polite, merciful scientist who tried to help Doom, clearly adored his baby sister, and spared the Marvel Zombies when he could have gassed them to death and called it a day.

It was the equivalent of Quinn Mallory becoming an emotionless sociopath in Season 4 of SLIDERS and I waited for the comics to explain what the hell was going on. Instead, Ultimate Reed became even more of a psychopathic, mass murdering sociopath who renamed himself The Maker.

It was bizarre and everything there remains as incomprehensible as Quinn being unconcerned with Wade in "Mother and Child" and as baffling as Quinn being indifferent to rescuing his mother and adopted home Earth in "Revelations" and as traumatic as the Professor's horrific murder in "The Exodus" and typing all this is actually making me upset and distraught and pained and agonized and confused and Temporal Flux is right and ULTIMATE FF was a terrible experience I can't go through this again good bye.

So, what's wrong with THE FLASH this year? ARROW had a strong final season. LEGENDS has been very enjoyable. SUPERGIRL is continuing its strengths from last year. But THE FLASH -- something still isn't quite right with the show. Season 6 is alright. It has moments of excellence. But I don't find it excellent overall.

Despite the ticking clock of CRISIS, despite the well-written storyline of Barry losing the Speed Force, THE FLASH doesn't seem as fun, inventive or quick-witted as Seasons 1 - 2 and I suspect that the problem cannot be solved; the problem is that the Flash is a *very* difficult character to write and the only creator with a strong vision for THE FLASH as a TV show was rightly fired out of television.

The hardest part of writing any superhero is writing for their gimmick. XENA, CAPTAIN AMERICA and BATMAN must create situation after situation that can only be resolved with the characters throwing a discus or a batarang. SPIDER-MAN must create decades' worth of problems that can only be addressed with webbing. And THE FLASH must devise 22 problems a season that can only be resolved with superspeed. Unrepentant sexual harasser Andrew Kreisberg had an enormous talent for crafting threats and villains where Barry's superspeed seemed useless or a liability from the Reverse Flash to Zoom to Multiplex to the Thinker. He wrote scene upon scene where the Flash doesn't make any headway into this year's mystery or mythology, but he saves civilians in an exciting special effects sequence. He yanks them out of car wrecks, rips them from collapsing buildings, evacuates them from floods.

That's been missing for awhile. It's been missing ever since unrepentant sexual harasser Andrew Kreisberg was thrown out of film and TV during the last quarter of Season 4. You can spot exactly when unrepentant sexual harasser Andrew Kreisberg carried his boxes out of the office: it's when the remaining writers turned the Thinker into Sylar from HEROES, as Slider_Quinn21 put it. Kreisberg's staff didn't have the skill to keep the Thinker sufficiently threatening through his thinking, unfortunately -- which is something even a resurrected Douglas Adams would have needed some time to work out. And Kreisberg's surviving staff presented Season 5 as the year where the Flash spent over 20 episodes unable to defeat a villain with a knife.

With Season 6, the writers have attempted to address their mistakes: they split the season in half so that the Flash wouldn't seem incompetent in needing all year to stop one normal speed villain. They've spread their attention around Barry's team so that the characters without superspeed have problems too. They've brought the theme of speed back into the stories by having Barry race against the countdown to CRISIS, then race against his depleting Speed Force. They are responsible, reliable professionals who have not sexually harassed anyone and are therefore vastly preferable to unrepentant sexual harasser Andrew Kreisberg.

But, unfortunately, THE FLASH's sixth season reflects a painful lack of skill in crafting high speed situations that can only be resolved with the Flash applying his superspeed in a clever and innovative way. There have been no newly developed speed flourishes. No impossible puzzles of human life to be resolved with imaginative application of Barry's powers.

THE FLASH is a very difficult concept that requires a certain mindset to plausibly threaten the Flash and make his victories seem hard earned and the Season 5 - 6 writers simply don't have that skillset. It's not a knock against them -- I can't draw or write SLIDERS-style social satire and the FLASH's current writers can't write superspeed effectively. The current writing team on THE FLASH were never hired to lead their show; they were hired to follow the lead of unrepentant sexual harasser Andrew Kreisberg who is no longer leading anything or anyone and never will again. They have been promoted in his permanent absence. It is an impossible situation for those who remain.

Season 6. I mean, it's fine. It's not as horrific as Season 3 of SLIDERS or as tedious as Season 5 of SLIDERS or as incompetently incoherent as Season 4 of SLIDERS. It is okay.

Wait, WHAT?

When was it established that Harrison Wells and his doubles were retroactively erased from the past?

When was it established that Jay Garrick was erased from the past?

I don't remember this at all! Maybe I was looking at my phone when this established. What?!!?

**

Regarding Batwoman's angst on having taken a life and Curtis informing her that even Batman couldn't stick to that rule 100 per cent of the time and that the Joker is dead -- I am okay with this. In superhero comics, superheroes exist in a highly impressionistic world where human beings seem far more resilient than their real world counterparts. But in live action -- as Informant once pointed out, there is a weight and physical impact to superhero battles that makes it unbelievable that Batman never killed any henchmen when crashing through buildings and throwing people off balconies.

That said, I would prefer that even live action superheroes never set out to intentionally murder anybody and when Kate killed her captive, immobilized prisoner, her prisoner was a man who had warped and broken her sister and was actively tormenting Kate into attacking him with lethal force for the second time. He wanted her to kill him and Kate understandably lost control. I wouldn't give Kate a medal, but I would excuse her for being victimized by a master manipulator who deliberately pushes people into murderous desperation.

Barry killed the Atom Smasher in Season 2, exposing him to lethal doses of radiation and stopping an otherwise unstoppable foe. There was no onscreen discussion about the morality of this.

Superheroes generally don't kill in comics, but that has less to do with morality and more to do with not wanting to kill off villains that writers might like to use next month. BATWOMAN has decided to step into shifting Batman's moral code to being less a requirement and more a preference that sometimes has to be waived. I wouldn't want the comic book characters to do that, but I understand and respect it in live action.

Recently, someone said regarding the show CASTLE:

A treasured writing mentor (no, not this one, it was Informant) pointed out to me that we're writers. We aren't gods. We might be creating a fictional reality and populating it with living beings, but we don't know everything, we don't understand everything, and we'll often have to accept that our creation is flawed because we don't have the information or time to define every corner of our world. We'll have to prioritize making specific elements of our work entertaining and plausible at the expense of some other area where we are less skilled.

Informant argued that these areas of low priority are not even necessarily flaws as much as areas outside the author's chosen focus.

Another beloved writing mentor (this one) once asked me a very incisive question. He asked me, "What are you trying to accomplish?" Was I trying to write an exploration of alternate paths that events might have taken? Was it a series of science fiction set pieces? Was it a deep dive into the minutia of a television show that most people had willfully blocked out of memory? Was it a drama surrounding a college reunion? And what was I doing to meet any of those goals? "What are you trying to accomplish?"

With that in mind, I'd say that if a TV show decides that its priority is giving its leads episode-long arguments and that's what it chooses to excel it at the expense of other priorities, then those non-priorities are not flaws. STAR TREK was not a plausible depiction of naval life; FRINGE wasn't a likely rendition of FBI task forces; LOST was not a realistic picture of survivalism and THE FLASH is not a serious presentation of forensic investigation.

They were trying to accomplish something else and we might be better off asking ourselves what the creators were trying to do, if they achieved it and then ask whether or not it was worth the attempt or if the goal was flawed. If CASTLE sets out to have Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic arguing and then it manages to fill seven years' worth of episodes with Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic arguing, then its failure to present other content is no failure at all.

On the other hand, if the eighth season features Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic only sharing the screen in two scenes per episode because the actors refuse to work together for more than two days a week, then it has absolutely failed.

I really don't see anything sloppy about the writing. Across TOS, TNG, DS9 and NEMESIS, the Romulans had shown a propensity for treacherous backstabbing at every opportunity. It's perfectly reasonable that after the Romulans attacked the Klingon Empire and razed Cardassia in the Dominion War and tried to blow up Earth in NEMESIS, few people outside the Romulan Star Empire were inclined to offer a helping hand that had traditionally been cut off every time anyone tried to do anything for the Romulans. The Zhat Vash were deranged extremists more interested in their pet values of hating all artificial intelligence than aid for their suffering people and reprogrammed the Mars robots to attack.

Picard's outrage at Starfleet abandoning the Romulans is because Starfleet pledged to help anyone in trouble no matter who they were or what they'd done before. And his fury is reasonable, but I think PICARD also establishes that the Federation can't be blamed for deciding that they would prefer not to assist a brutal dictatorship that always took any effort of charity as an opportunity to attack. Picard welcomed Romulan refugees to live in his home; the Federation wouldn't match his effort.

https://medium.com/@r0ckthastarz/alliso … 45b8281f45

A highly anecdotal account of meeting Allison Mack. *shudders*

**

Also, Grizzlor’s photo with Allison Mack is now her Wikipedia headshot.

COUNTDOWN 2009 did indeed feature a restored Data as Captain of the Enterprise. The TNG novels, which don't tie into COUNTDOWN, also featured a restored Data.

The android insurrection on Mars was revealed to be caused by the Zhat Vash, a faction of Romulans who loathe artificial life and expect that its rise would bring about an AI apocalypse.

I don't know how intentional this was, but given how the Federation is suddenly using money in PICARD when it was a post-scarcity, post-currency society in TNG, DS9 and VOY, I think we have to take it to mean that the destruction of Mars impacted the Federation's ability to produce and maintain replicators. But PICARD takes the view that the Federation didn't do its best under difficult circumstances; that it just gave up and cut the Romulans loose on the grounds that the Romulans had (a) sided with the Dominion 24 years ago and (b) tried to blow up Earth 20 years ago. That the Federation didn't even do what it could; it just decided to do nothing.

Years ago, I was working with a new guy in my office. This is unusual for me because my friends and co-workers are generally women and I have a strong aversion to men unless they're Temporal Flux, Slider_Quinn21, Transmodiar, Grizzlor, or dating / married to one of my friends. Andy, a junior high aged summer intern, asked me if I'd ever seen WAREHOUSE 13 on Syfy. He said it started out very badly but he loved it from episode 4 onward. He insisted that episode 4 was the greatest thing he'd ever seen.

I bought the Season 1 DVD set at this used electronics store and the first three episodes were a clumsy, awkward X-FILES clone filmed in Toronto for 1/3 of the budget with a lot of beige hallways, very much like Season 5 of SLIDERS. The cast seemed talented but unsure of how to characterize some thin scripting; Secret Service agents Pete Latimer and Myka Bering are put to work tracking down supernatural artifacts to contain in Warehouse 13, but they exhibit a strange lack of curiosity as to who created Warehouse 13, who runs it, how these artifacts function, etc..

The pilot episode of WAREHOUSE 13 seems like something that nobody wanted to make. The original idea was from Ronald D. Moore. The first draft of the script was by Rockne O'Bannon (FARSCAPE) and Jane Espenson (BUFFY, ONCE UPON A TIME, GILMORE GIRLS, JESSICA JONES) but Syfy bought it and retooled it with D. Brent Mote (DR. QUINN), then again with Espenson, then finally with David Simkin (LOIS AND CLARK, DARK ANGEL, ANGEL, CHARMED).

As a result, the pilot has the story elements of a paranoid, conspiracy-minded series of secret agents in a shadow government organization, the concepts of a madcap sci-fi/fantasy comedy, and the tone of simple, Nickelodeon children's show where the heroes look to find and contain dangerous supernatural objects and the questions of who they work for and why is not something kids would ask. It is inherently contradictory and confused, clearly the product of multiple writers working at cross purposes. It was weak and dull, but Andy struck me as a bright young man of interesting tastes, so I struggled to episode 4.

Listening to a podcast with WAREHOUSE 13 showrunner Jack Kenny, it seems he was also struggling. He was not involved with WAREHOUSE 13 until after the pilot had been filmed and the series had been ordered. Assuming control of the series, Kenny's version of WAREHOUSE 13 took until episode 4 to materialize when the show is livened up by a new character: a troubled, spunky 19-year-old computer hacker named Claudia who breaks into Warehouse 13 to demand answers to all the questions above.

Claudia is snarky, sardonic and quippy in the way young women on TV are when written by good men in their late 40s who write teenaged girls. ("Dude, just shut it down." "This is so not groovy!") Claudia is gifted with all the wit and charm of much older women, serving as an aspirational but relatable figure to young girls. No teenaged girl is like Claudia, but her daring braininess makes her a healthy role model.

Claudia sparked something in the rest of the cast that finally made the Warehouse 13 team cohere as an eccentric family unit with Claudia as the child among them. Claudia is daring and outspoken in a way that a junior high school student like young Andy likely found admirable. Claudia is capable and strong but deeply troubled in a way that a junior high student like Andy might view as making her accessible. Claudia is a driven go-getter and I know Andy's mother, a co-worker in my office, to also be a driven go-getter.

I have no doubt that Andy found Claudia sexy with her punk appareil and purple tinted hair and Allison Scagliotti’s slender, gym toned figure, but he obviously liked her because she was smart.

Claudia on WAREHOUSE 13 was a somewhat age appropriate crush for a junior high student and Allison Scagliotti was/is a pretty girl, but she was presented as a powerful girl, a skillful investigator, and an eager pupil in the art of paranormal investigations and, in my view, an extremely healthy sexual and romantic fantasy for Andy. Claudia was a portrait of a girl close to his age and with ambition, drive, ability and determination. Claudia is a bit like the Season 3 Wade who became some sort of superhacker that year.

I hope Andy found someone like Claudia in real life. I should ask his mother if he did.

WAREHOUSE 13 is the undemanding, low stakes procedural that I need right now. The procedural that America needs right now! And I consider "QED" an episode of the show. WAREHOUSE 13 has some interesting parallels with SLIDERS and the potential for legally dissimilar shows about parallel universes. Watching the first several episodes of WAREHOUSE 13, WAREHOUSE 13 is clearly a legally dissimilar copy of THE X-FILES with two government agents (Secret Service, not FBI!) investigating supernatural artifacts (to confiscate and cover them up, not to expose them! Not like THE X-FILES at all!).

The pilot episode of WAREHOUSE 13 seems like something that nobody wanted to make or take ownership of, much like Season 5 of SLIDERS. The original script was written by Rockne O'Bannon (FARSCAPE) and Jane Espenson (BUFFY, ONCE UPON A TIME, GILMORE GIRLS, JESSICA JONES) but Syfy bought it and then retooled it with at least four different writing teams before landing on Jack Kenny, a veteran of children's fantasy show THE SECRET WORLD OF ALEX MACK. By the time WAREHOUSE 13 made it to air, it had become an indecisive, confused product. A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy with many contradictory sensibilities.

The Pilot has the story elements of a paranoid, conspiracy-minded series of secret agents in a shadow government organization and a simple, Nickelodeon children's show where the heroes look to find and contain dangerous supernatural objects and the questions of who they work for and why is not something kids would ask. WAREHOUSE 13 also seems to be visually very similar to Season 5 of SLIDERS with interior locations being redressed beige hallways if it's not the warehouse set that's the equivalent of SLIDERS' Chandler Hotel.

But WAREHOUSE 13 cast well. And by the end of the first season, WAREHOUSE 13 had succeeded in doing what SLIDERS did in its first two seasons: it created a strong ensemble with the exuberant and childish Eddie McClintock, the bookish and flustered Joanne Kelly, the sardonic Allison Scagliotti and the jaded Saul Rubinek. And their affable, friendly chemistry smoothed out the conceptual confusion of their show. WAREHOUSE 13 was still a legally dissimilar X-FILES shot on a much lower budget, but it was an amiable, undemanding, unchallenging, lightweight X-FILES clone that was soothing and relaxing. Aside from the comedy episodes, THE X-FILES was never fun.

WAREHOUSE 13 being a clone of a pre-existing property and then cloned from subsequent drafts of the clone itself, however, was always something that held it back. I wonder if it is simply bad development strategy to look at a previously successful series and try to replicate it but with just enough differences to a void a lawsuit. But it can work sometimes. BILL AND TED was plainly an American Polaroid of a DOCTOR WHO episode. STAR WARS was an American portrait of THE HIDDEN FORTRESS.

**

What would JOHN RHYS-DAVIES' SLIDERS be like?

Jerry O'Connell and John Rhys-Davies, last year, were very enthusiastic about conceiving a new SLIDERS project. Assuming they could get Cleavant and Sabrina back and that they would be setting the creative direction -- what would Jerry and John want to do with SLIDERS? John most definitely has serious creative ambitions for SLIDERS. He wanted to run the writer's room and write scripts. But he also wanted to be the lead character and for Jerry to be his sidekick. I don't know if that's changed in the years that have passed.

I imagine that John would probably want JOHN RHYS-DAVIES' SLIDERS to just start over from the ground up again and he would want to take ownership of the new show and define it with his personality and interests. And I'm not sure John's interests are in social satire; judging from his personality, he would probably be more along the lines of overt lecturing and moral outrage and it would be a very different voice for SLIDERS having originally been more indirect and comedic.

John also doesn't want to do more than a year or two of playing Arturo before quitting and moving on.

I suspect Jerry doesn't have any real creative ambitions aside from always being happy to be working. He's the executive producer of CARTER and it's very obvious from watching CARTER that Jerry just wants to hang out with his friends on the set for 10 episodes a year.

I wonder if this might become a thread about all my favourite action girls.

Sooo, watching Jerry O'Connell's very mediocre CARTER had me moving on to watching CASTLE. CARTER strikes me as a legally dissimilar photocopy of CASTLE, about a man from the entertainment industry blundering into crime solving with a no-nonsense lady police detective. Except CARTER foolishly made its leading man an actor with no applicable skills to fighting crime and whereas CASTLE features a mystery novelist who actually has something to offer a procedural series.

But I have to say, the appeal of CASTLE is Nathan Fillion's interaction with Stana Katic and Stana Katic's Detective Kate Beckett is another interesting model of what Maggie Beckett could have been. Katic is strangely similar to Kari Wuhrer at certain angles with the cheekbone defined triangle of Wuhrer's face and the reddish brown hair that frames her face just like Wuhrer. But CASTLE films and costumes Katic so differently: the angles on Katic are specifically to bring out her furrowed brow and laser-like glare as she glowers at Nathan Fillion's antics.

Katic's costuming is also terrific. In Season 1, she only wears a dress in two scenes. The rest of the time, she's clad in large lapeled coats, leather jackets, smart blazers, sharp blouses -- and there's some impressive subtlety in the tailoring where at certain angles, the camera picks up on the curve of Katic's back or the rounding of her cleavage, but it's always incidental, the result of Katic wearing clothes that have been fitted to her form.

Kate Beckett is very well-written. Admittedly, her character is just running through all the procedural tropes. But what makes the character comes alive is Katic playing off Fillion. While Fillion gets all the good wisecracks, Katic easily punctures his ego and the fact that she retains composure and focus when Fillion is being so funny -- it makes Katic's Kate Beckett seem like a focused, professional, clearheaded public servant with a crisp cool that is perpetually unruffled. Katic ensures that even when Beckett is annoyed, Beckett is still in control. Where Fillion is aggressively reacting, Katic is aggressively thinking.

There are many, many shots of Katic looking curiously around various crime scenes, her eyes narrowed pensively, her bearing thoughtful and and calculating, her face absorbing all information around her -- it reminds me of how Jerry played Quinn. It reminds me of Jerry's performance in "In Dinos Veritas" where Jerry is looking around The Cave, showing Quinn spotting all the entrance and exit points and coming up with a plan. Katic quietly conveys that Kate Beckett is a crimefighting genius whose cleverness is obscured by Castle's showboating.

Maybe Stana Katic should play Quinn Mallory.

I've only seen the first season of CASTLE. I'm going to assume from Transmodiar's reaction that CASTLE suffers from behind the scenes issues that causes the show to lose its clear, focused sense of purpose which is to have Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic onscreen arguing and the murder mysteries being incidental if not irrelevant. They could be restaurant chefs. I do recall numerous press articles during its later years detailing how Fillion and Katic had become so hostile that by the end, they would not film together for more than two scenes an episode. It could be difficult for a show about Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic arguing endlessly to function if it could no longer have Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic in the same scenes for entire episodes.

Which, I think, speaks to another point of interest with SLIDERS. Over in the DECLASSIFIED thread, reading Temporal Flux's screenplay has made me realize to my shock that SLIDERS does not need Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo to be SLIDERS -- that the SLIDERS brand is in social satire and commentary rather than Jerry O'Connell.

However, if the purpose is to revive SLIDERS as opposed to creating a legally dissimilar series with a different title, then you need to use characters named Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo and keep characters with these names together for five to seven years or you'd end up with Grizzlor's poll here, contemplating where the show should have been allowed to die a quick death. CASTLE and Transmodiar's mocking laughter towards CASTLE may be another indication of this.

Which means it's vital to hire writers who can run a show for up to a decade and actors who wouldn't ditch the show or take it for granted or refuse to be in the same room. The Bryan Fullers and David Duchovnys of the world wouldn't work for this.

Ideally, you'd want young actors to play Quinn and Wade who have worked in the business for awhile, who've been child actors, who've seen the ups and downs of business and would appreciate a potentially stable job. Kids who've been in Disney Channel type shows that were never huge hits. And you'd want older actors for Rembrandt and Arturo who don't consider themselves above television and wouldn't ditch it for a movie or Broadway and wouldn't drunkenly embarrass a network executive for no good reason whatsoever.

In terms of creators -- you'd want writers and producers who'd form close, personal friendships with their cast and ensure that everyone will be getting along for a decade and who have written material close to SLIDERS' comedy satire.

In the past, I've always though of science fiction writers like J. Michael Straczynski (BABYLON 5) or Jeff Pinkner and Joel Wyman (FRINGE) for SLIDERS, but in the light of DECLASSIFIED, I realize that Straczynski's writing is too preachy for SLIDERS and Pinkner and Wyman are too technology-focused in their science fiction. I also liked the idea of Dan Harmon (COMMUNITY) writing SLIDERS, but again, after DECLASSIFIED -- I realize that SLIDERS is not a situation comedy about wacky characters and that maybe I should have noticed before spending 2015 - 2016 writing just that.

I think I would now want Michael Schur (BROOKLYN NINE NINE) and Greg Daniels (PARKS AND RECREATION) to write SLIDERS as both writers have worked together (on PARKS) and their comedy with police officers and municipal government presented an extremely ambivalent and comedic take on these institutions, never preaching their fundamental importance but never condemning them either. Instead, both Schur and Daniels' scripts focused on the peculiarities and eccentricities of the people within these establishment organizations as they worked with or against or for one another or the public.

I think every long running series is going to have its regrets. But SLIDERS kept falling into holes and Grizzlor's poll shows how SLIDERS kept digging itself deeper with David Peckinpah always having a brand new shovel for Rembrandt with each season premiere. A new SLIDERS needs builders, not diggers, and that attitude has to be reflected among all the cast and creators whether it's Jerry and John playing older versions of the originals (doubles or not) or a new team.

All this watching CARTER to contemplate how Jerry would play Quinn today prompted a vague memory of my sister having described a series called CASTLE. Which is on Amazon Prime. And I refuse to give Amazon any money due to their work practices. Therefore, I put on a hazmat suit that I stole from a university eight years ago, drove over to my niece's house and broke in while she was walking her dog (alright, I have a key) and cloned her Amazon Prime account off the sideloaded Android app on her Android TV box (alright, the password was written on a piece of paper on a corkscrew board) and exited the house with no one the wiser and watched a couple episodes of CASTLE -- a show about a mystery novelist (Nathan Fillion) who inflicts his annoying presence on Kate, a no nonsense New York City homicide detective (Stana Katic).

It occurred to me that CARTER, airing two years after CASTLE ended in 2016, is a legally dissimilar version of CASTLE attempting to mine the market that CASTLE left open: a procedural where a man from the entertainment industry is paired with a straight laced police investigator. CASTLE was a taut, capable, well-paced, focused series about the belligerent sexual tension between Fillion and Katic and novelist Richard Castle had some actual (if delusional) insight and flashes of brilliance to offer murder mysteries.

In contrast, Jerry O'Connell's Carter is so juvenile that he never comes off as Sydney Tamiia Poitier's equal and in making Jerry's character an actor as opposed to a writer, Jerry's role on his own show is that of an annoying guest-star who should be tolerated for one episode and dismissed entirely. If CARTER is trying to file off the serial numbers of CASTLE to avoid a lawsuit, it ends up sanding down what made CASTLE effective in the first place.

Could something like this happen to SLIDERS if it were revived in the form of a legally dissimilar TV show?

I finished CARTER's second season. I confess that I was not giving it my full attention and had it on the TV while at the sofa photo editing / steam cleaning my clothes and stuffed animals / completing paperwork / arranging meatballs / cutting chicken wings / writing on this message board. I did concentrate whenever Sydney Tamiia Poitier was onscreen, however. This is Sydney Tamiia Poitier, for God's sake; she commands attention and compels me to drop anything and everything to pay attention. Just from her posture and a raised eyebrow and a pleasant yet authoritative smile, Sydney Tamiia Poitier conveys that Sydney Tamiia Poitier is a highly proficient professional of hypercompetent determination.

In contrast, Jerry O'Connell is so obnoxious as Carter (and I agree with pilight that it's deliberate). CARTER is 20 episodes as of Season 2; Carter has a case closure rate of 100 per cent. I don't know how this is possible as Jerry is determined to make Carter the most erratically inept investigator alive. To quote MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, perfect or not, Carter's methods look suspiciously like chance and his results would appear alarmingly like luck.

I don't know how Sydney Tamiia Poitier's Sam tolerates Carter and Sydney Tamiia Poitier's performance indicates that Sydney Tamiia Poitier is so good at her job that Jerry O'Connell at his twitchiest cannot seriously impede Sydney Tamiia Poitier from accomplishing anything that Sydney Tamiia Poitier sets her mind to doing.

The mysteries are not that interesting. The stakes are always incredibly low. The threats are not convincing. A running 'gag' (I think) is Carter referring to previous episodes of his TV show, CALL CARTER which is (I think) a completely fictional TV series that doesn't exist meaning Carter is referring to nothing whatsoever. I think that it's supposed to be funny but it's meaningless. This show has no reason to exist except that 10 episodes a year of Sydney Tamiia Poitier creates a marginally better world than one without 10 episodes of Sydney Tamiia Poitier except this is Sydney Tamiia Poitier and surely she deserves a better job.

Season 2 ends on a soft cliffhanger where Carter asks Sydney Tamiia Poitier not to leave the small town for New York City because Carter is in love with her. Sydney Tamiia Poitier regards Carter in this cliffhanger with slightly teary eyes, I assume, because the wind blew into her eyes at that point. I have no idea what the Sydney Tamiia Poitier would see in the dysfunctional man child that Jerry O'Connell is playing in this series; she's a responsible, capable career woman and Jerry's version of Harley Carter seems incapable of opening a door without causing a scene. Once again, Sydney Tamiia Poitier plays the moment to indicate that if she were to lower her standards to date an extremely childish Jerry O'Connell, it wouldn't seriously interfere with her goals in life.

A lot of CARTER is Jerry O'Connell engaging in what looks suspiciously like actors' exercises with minor league Canadian stars that may be very amusing to people who are friends with a lot of actresses (raises hand) but meaningless to anyone else.

CARTER is funded by some Canadian media companies and the beneficiary of some Canadian tax credits and is filmed in the small Canadian town of North Bay. It's only just finished airing its latest 10 episodes in America and may or may not get a third season and that decision is probably dependent on funding rather than ratings. CARTER is a marginally diverting hour of television and an interesting study into Jerry O'Connell's acting in the modern era. I'm not sure who else would want to watch CARTER.

I can report that Jerry O'Connell clearly LOVES the show. Perhaps a little too much given how his visible glee and relish for his ridiculous character is so high energy that he noticeably drains energy from ME just from watching him. It is very clear that ever since Jerry quit drinking, his enthusiasm for his work has been cranked up to the point where he's not entirely able to restrain himself at times. I recognize, as pilight observed, that Harley Carter is meant to be a terrible actor and that he sees acting as drawing attention to himself rather than conveying the emotion and meaning of the scene, but when nearly every scene has Jerry at his most manic, then every scene becomes the same.

If CARTER gets a third season, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to have another 10 episodes of Sydney Tamiia Poitier being commanding and driven and somehow above all of Carter's nonsense.

More from Trank on F4 and how he deliberately prevented a CHRONICLE sequel:

https://www.polygon.com/2020/5/5/212466 … -chronicle

It sounds like Temporal Flux was pitching X-MEN material to Marvel during the Grant Morrison era when Morrison decided to downplay X-MEN's civil rights metaphors in favour of the X-MEN demonstrating conflict between progressivism and conservatism, youth and age, punk and classicism by having mutants developing their own culture and value system separate from humans.

Morrison's NEW X-MEN was brilliant, but as with SLIDERS, Morrison's approach required a very specific set of life experiences and interests and eccentricities to tell stories with his model and other writers floundered when trying to work within this new house style. Morrison was only writing one X-MEN title with different writers scripting the other 10 - 15.

X-MEN as a civil rights allegory is something any writer can approach with their own spin while still producing a recognizable X-MEN story. X-MEN as teen angst is a massive oversimplification of a template that was too complicated and idiosyncratic to assign to anyone other than Grant Morrison. SLIDERS under Torme and Weiss has a personality of unpretentious and low-key satire that aims for contemplation rather than condemnation. "The Weaker Sex" doesn't propose that women are better than men; it just puts the balance of power on the other side. "Luck of the Draw" doesn't endorse population control; it asks you to think about it.

It's difficult to write, but Torme and Weiss weren't just writing their own scripts; they were editing and revising everyone else's. Morrison wasn't editing and revising anyone else's X-MEN stories other than his own on NEW X-MEN.

Temporal Flux's DECLASSIFIED shows how SLIDERS has a house style like Grant Morrison's NEW X-MEN -- but unlike NEW X-MEN, SLIDERS doesn't disqualify other styles but in fact incorporates them. In Season 2 of SLIDERS, the Torme/Weiss model of comedic social commentary is somewhat diminished as new writers came aboard and Weiss was no longer involved. To write a Torme/Weiss story, you have to have a certain peculiarity of personality, I think.

Temporal Flux is someone who watches both FOX and CNN news and then identifies the truth as somewhere in between. Temporal Flux is a person of uncommon clarity and wide perspective and I think you need that to tell this sort of SLIDERS story. I personally do not have that. Few people do which is why most people who write SLIDERS stories are more on the Tony Blake and Paul Jackson spectrum.

Blake and Jackson are two very solid action-adventure writers who wrote and produced a lot of 90s TV. They wrote "Love Gods" in Season 2 and "Double Cross" in Season 3. Neither script has Torme and Weiss' gentle parodies of popular culture, neither presents a tilted perspective on gender divides or environmentalist concerns. But both "Love Gods" and "Double Cross" are recognizably SLIDERS stories because they feature Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt, Arturo, alternate history, exploration of a parallel world, the perspective of the multiverse and so long as you have those aspects of SLIDERS, you can tell good stories that are still SLIDERS stories.

But when you don't have those elements to tell a SLIDERS story, then you need the house style. The original voice. The Torme/Weiss perspective on SLIDERS as a platform for social satire that is indirect, comedic, non-judgemental and invites thought and consideration. That will make the story feel like SLIDERS when it doesn't have *the* sliders.

However, the challenge of maintaining SLIDERS' identity without the sliders -- that's something the actual SLIDERS TV show fumbled and whereas Temporal Flux's personality is so in tune with SLIDERS that even when his story doesn't feature the sliders, it is recognizably and authentically SLIDERS.

I'm deeper into Season 2 of CARTER and I'm seeing another side to Jerry O'Connell -- but it isn't necessarily an improvement. In Season 4 of SLIDERS, we saw Jerry at his most disengaged from his material, not infusing his dialogue with emotion, not reacting to onscreen events, staring vacantly off camera and blandly fading into the background. CARTER shows Jerry at the extreme opposite of his last year on SLIDERS; Jerry is determined to mine every syllable for overpronounced, overdetermined emotion and he is so much in the foreground with his (in-character) mugging for the camera that he is exhausting to see onscreen. Carter is one of the most gratingly obnoxious characters that Jerry has ever performed.

However, there's an episode of CARTER where Jerry has to threaten someone and he performs his threat in a low key, offhand, sinister in its laid back delivery with Jerry's suddenly muted body language making Carter seem frightening because his relentlessly intense efforts to engage with others are suddenly absent.

I'm not sure it's the best acting choice to have the Carter character always at a 15 out of 10 on the intensity scale, but it's clear that Jerry retains all his skills as an actor and that his overlaboured effort in CARTER is an acting choice.

I think Slide Override's analysis of DECLASSIFIED's technical merits as a screenplay is very interesting.

I personally got a lot out of the Reese character, particularly his monologue with Alli. I have never talked about this because DECLASSIFIED wasn't public, but I read DECLASSIFIED before I decided to write SLIDERS REBORN. I wanted to write SLIDERS scripts, but I didn't know what I wanted to say aside from declaring that I really missed Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo.

When I read the pages of Reese describing the sliding technology as a device that cuts through the pages of the book that is reality -- it made me realize that I did have something I wanted to express. I wanted to say that the science of SLIDERS is really the science of stories, the mechanics of plot, characterization, world-building, action and result and that I could present that in my own SLIDERS writing.

And Reese's monologue is quite beautifully written and I imagined it being performed by Brandon Routh. On the subject of dream casting, when I first read DECLASSIFIED, I thought Alli was clearly Allison Mack, but on this recent re-read, I saw Alli as Allison Scagliotti and am relieved that Hollywood will continue to produce hyperactive young women named Allison even as Allison Mack is in under house arrest for sex trafficking.

I got a lot out of Bennish too. To me, Bennish is just the stoner classmate in Arturo's class, but TF has seen a lot more depth in the character, first observing that Bennish seems to be about 25 - 30 years in the past at all times culturally, and second by noting that Bennish isn't as intelligent as he claims, observing that Bennish was ranting about nuclear power in "Last Days" but not actually engaged in any development and that Arturo did all the work on the bomb while Bennish interfered and distracted. TF said that Bennish was designed as a foil and a catalyst and I saw that understanding lead to Bennish being so clearly exposed for what he is in DECLASSIFIED.

I think the strongest influence of DECLASSIFIED for me -- I would get stalled a lot on my fan fiction because it never seemed to properly replicate the original spirit and voice of SLIDERS. My world building was not acceptable. And then Temporal Flux presented a perfect representation of SLIDERS through his storytelling instincts and his own personality.

I realized that for him and likely for Torme and Weiss, SLIDERS is a song they know how to sing intuitively. For other SLIDERS writers, SLIDERS is more an instrument that will sound different in each person's hands and that it was alright to embrace SLIDERS as an instrument. I could never be Temporal Flux and I now understood that I didn't have to try to be as funny and satirical; I would instead aim for capturing the voices of the actors and be earnest and heartfelt.

Once I grasped that, I was able to produce some enjoyable results by writing Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo stories, stories about the sliders. But Temporal Flux's DECLASSIFIED is actually a SLIDERS story.

Tara Reade has changed her story again, claiming that the record of her sexual harassment complaint  she demanded that Biden release contains no complaint of sexual harassment. She also cancelled her Sunday interview on FOX. She did this on Friday, shortly after Biden wrote on Medium that he would ask the National Archives to release any documents pertaining to Reade and followed up with a letter asking the Secretary of Senate to do the same. https://apnews.com/aec7beb03e9e0e0e6e3c58111293e0ea

I've written before that Biden doesn't follow the pattern of silencing, distraction and intimidating that most abusers follow. There is another pattern in abusers where the perpetrator will tell the victim that if they perform a certain task, the abuse will cease; the abuser will then move the goalposts to declare that their target failed to meet the conditions to end their suffering. It is particularly common in those who engage in elder abuse with the view that the elderly with their long and faded memories can be easy targets.

Reade was the one who insisted on repeating her demand that Biden release documents that would validate the part of her story where she reported his harassment. Now that Biden has consented to release any such records, she's changing her story to say that those documents wouldn't support her story after all.

Then what was she hoping to accomplish in demanding these documents? Aside notoriety, attention and abusing her former employer?

Reade later claimed on Twitter that the Associated Press story is false, but when asked to elaborate -- was she misquoted? Were her quotes falsified? She didn't reply.

David Axelrod, Obama's former campaign manager, reported that he was part of reviewing Biden's history and documents when Obama was considering Biden for VP. Axelrod says there was no record of any complaint from Tara Reade and that in vetting VP candidates, complaints of this nature would have been located and flagged for follow-up interviews with anyone involved. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/01/opinions … =hvper.com

It is a terrible thing to say that a woman should not be believed when she says that she has been assaulted. It is horrific for female victims to see fellow survivors be disbelieved. But Reade is behaving like an abuser: moving the goalposts of her demands, using the supposed vagaries of an old man's memory to attack him where he seems defenceless -- and now that Biden has proven able to defend himself with gentleness and affirmation and accountability, Reade is abruptly reversing and retreating.

Biden said that Reade's harassment complaint documents, if they exist, would be in the National Archives. Business Insider reached out to National Archives and were informed that Senate records would not be stored with them.

Later today, Biden sent a new letter to Julie Adams, Secretary of the Senate. The letter from Biden, which he also made public, states that he was under the impression at the National Archives would have the records. He's since been informed that the Senate retains them after all. Biden asks that Adams locate Reade's complaint and any and all related documents and make them public.

In my view, Biden isn't trying to cover anything up and he isn't trying to hide anything. We've seen how actual abusers with platforms and resources like Biden's handle allegations. They threaten legal action. They try to buy their victims' silence. They smear their victims as unstable, delusional, deceitful and opportunistic. They call the victim ugly. They try to distract with alternate revelations. They try to claim that abuse is normal and refer to other celebrities doing the same.

But Biden's delayed response has revealed a desire to avoid traumatizing female abuse victims on a national stage even as he refutes an allegation of abuse. His refusals to speculate on Reade's reasons or motives are a refusal to smear a woman smearing him. His declaration that he will not retaliate against Reade in court or public opinion is comforting to women. His request for Reade's complaint to be located and publicized has been made openly. This is not the behaviour of an abuser.

I cannot stress enough in the name of Quinn's glasses, Wade's hockey tickets, Rembrandt's US dollars and the Professor's slide rule that the views of ireactions are not the views of the Sliders.TV community.

Well, Biden has a reputation for being physically intrusive with people -- not just women. It's an outdated attitude and it leaves Biden open to charges of sexual harassment and the fact that it wasn't intended sexually (which Reade herself originally claimed) is meaningless if the woman on the receiving end perceives it otherwise.

**

The Washington Post expanded more on how Biden would not want his Delaware-based records opened up because they contain numerous private conversations and communications that could be easily mined for political attacks and no candidate running for office would release those.

Again, I really have a lot of admiration for Biden refusing to speak poorly of Reade in any way or speculate as to her motives (at least not in a public statement), declaring that he would not pursue any reprisal against her, and simply saying that her accusation is untrue. His self-control and awareness of all the women who aren't Reade was admirable. At least that's how it looked to me. Anyway, here's a transcript.

A former Detroit prosecutor wrote an op-ed saying that Reade's story has a lot of points of suspicion. In addition to all her doubtful claims (that sexual assault wasn't understood in 1993, that Biden would rape her in a public hallway), obvious mental illness (her infatuation with a brutal dictator), penchant for contradictory lies (saying her self-posted Putin essays were taken out of context from a novel she was writing and also not written by her at all), her mother describing her child's supposed rapist as a figure of "respect" for whom the only recourse was "the press," Michael J. Stern points out:

Her story has changed, saying that Biden touched her non-sexually but intrusively to saying he raped her -- and her reasoning is that reporters weren't interested in her reporting rape which seems unlikely given how every reporter wants a scoop.

Her documents are missing: despite claiming she made a formal complaint, she has no copy of it for herself -- yet she kept her employment records outside of this complaint which leaves me wondering if this complaint even exists.

Her story doesn't come with a date; she says she can't remember when it happened -- but it also means that Biden can't use his 1993 calendar to prove himself elsewhere.

Her claim for why she was fired has changed, first saying she was dismissed for refusing to serve drinks; then saying she was fired for filing a complaint. This is not a trivial discrepancy.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/ … 046962001/

Michael Stern doesn't believe Reade. And I think Reade's story is suspicious and it's possible the Biden campaign wanted to let the story fade out based on how Reade's story and Reade herself are incoherent (my Putin fan fiction that I posted myself was taken out of context from a novel I was writing and also I didn't write it I was hacked). She seems like an erratic liar.

But she might also be erratic because she was sexually traumatized and it isn't Michael Stern's job to defend Joe Biden; that's Joe Biden's job.

I really like and appreciate Cathy Young's writing. But at the end of the day, women suffer so much for accusing perpetrators of rape. There is no upside to doing so which makes false accusations unlikely unless the accuser is mentally ill and delusional and prone to fraud and falsehoods and unable to distinguish fantasy from reality and perpetually altering their accounts of past events or potentially hired by Russia -- all of which seems possible given Reade's online behaviour from her Putin fetish to her revisions to her accounts of Biden's behaviour to her claims that her pro-Russia screeds were taken out of context when she posted them online or written by hackers using her accounts.

But we should believe women anyway until given reason not to and it is entirely Biden's responsibility to furnish those reasons for us with his own memories and documents.

Thus far, he has not. The officially unofficial word from inside Biden's campaign: he hasn't responded to Tara Reade's accusations yet because he is unwilling to speak poorly of her. He feels that saying that she is lying would also call any woman reporting assault to be a liar. That is not something he wants to do. But he is aware that he will have to eventually respond to the accusations directly.

Oh, stuff it. Your thread's getting activity and responses. You'll take what you're given! ;-)

And Jerry can stuff it too! He's lucky to be allowed to eat at the crafts services table. His film career was a joke. His daytime TV ambitions have been a wash. He couldn't even get THE MUNSTERS to series. His big TV show, CARTER, produces 10 episodes a year. If he's allowed to play Michael Mallory for a few months of mortgage payments for a few days of work, he'll take it. He's learned not to be a diva and accepted his self-made lot as a working class TV actor.

**

But in terms of the rollback -- Torme told me in 2000 that he wanted to roll the show back to "The Guardian" with his "Slide Effects" script. But when writing it in 2011, I picked "As Time Goes By" because I feel that once SLIDERS left Vancouver, it lost its visual identity. It lost the indie-film look of the show. It lost the washed out, grounded, gray tone of Vancouver as San Francisco. It lost the fiction of being set in San Francisco.

It lost the Temporal Flux branded production approach "travel light" where Quinn's basement was the chalkboard and coils in a storage locker that could be unpacked to make any bare studio space The Basement which could then be swapped out for pews and a stage to be a church or benches to be a courtroom or beds and false windows to make a motel or racks and registers to be Doppler Computers. Instead, production tied up its money in The Cave and The Chandler. If I were going to roll SLIDERS back to anywhere, it'd be "As Time Goes By" -- but I don't think it helps us much because SLIDERS should satirize and explore TODAY -- not 1996.

Slider_Quinn21 once remarked that "As Time Goes By" has the sliders separated, unable to reach each other with their non-existent cell phones and buying paper newspapers out of a box. The past has become another country and I have lost the ability to say anything that Temporal Flux, Slider_Quinn21 and Transmodiar didn't say first.

Continuing with the reboot-recast-continuation mode -- something TF said that really hit home with me is how a legally dissimilar show about parallel universes could never replace SLIDERS. And he's right: the willful differences would remove SLIDERS' strengths (even if this legally dissimilar production would have its own merits).

The appeal of SLIDERS to me is the characters (and yes, the actors) who are perfectly suited to each other in their contrasts. You have youth in Quinn and Wade and age in Rembrandt and Arturo. You have revolution in Quinn and Wade and conservatism in Rembrandt and Arturo. You have science in Quinn and Arturo and art in Rembrandt and Wade. You have academics in Quinn and Arturo and blue collar workers in Wade and Rembrandt. You have mathematical brilliance in Quinn and Arturo and emotional genius in Wade and Rembrandt. And what makes SLIDERS function best is that each episode is set in its own continuity of a separate parallel universe. You have the versatility of an anthology with the intense relatability of the characters; every demographic is addressed by at least ONE of the four sliders.

So, in a reboot, I'd like to see Quinn and Wade as teenagers and I don't mean as RIVERDALE teenagers but as the teenagers who play children on Disney shows like GIRL MEETS WORLD and LIV AND MADDIE -- and we could have a Rembrandt and Arturo played by actors in their 50s. I think an even larger age gap between Quinn & Wade and Rembrandt & Arturo would emphasize the strengths of the show and the specific strengths that cannot be imitated by any other parallel universe show that would have to file off the serial numbers.

Also important and legally distinct: the sliders are not agents of a government organization or employed by some tech conglomerate or some black ops force. They are essentially four misfits thrown together by circumstance, essentially four homeless people, so I would also emphasize that further: Quinn is a homeless kid who assembled a makeshift lab in a Doppler storage locker and sleeps in the staff lounge and Wade is a juvenile delinquent on probation for shoplifting whereas Rembrandt and Arturo are more stable adults (but not that much more stable).

So, ideally, a reboot would focus on all the things that make SLIDERS so distinct that any other show attempting to do the same would be sued for infringement. From a scripting standpoint, I think a rebooted SLIDERS should do remakes of the existing episodes but updated accordingly. A world where the Russians won the Cold War can be adjusted to the Russians having co-opted American elections and covertly controlling America. A world where the Summer of Love never ended can delve into drug culture gone out of control like Jerry O'Connell's "Narcotica" comic. Versions of "Please Press One" and "Map of the Mind" that are actually good.

And we could still have the rebooted cast meet the original cast to establish that the new actors are playing younger versions of the originals like STAR TREK (2009).

I'd like to see different genres in the show. Originally, the show had a very tight formula of the sliders entering a dystopian world, saddling up with the local resistance, toppling the dominate regime and leaving. I'd love to see that again, but I'd also like to see the office comedy episode, the mumblecore episode, the cyberpunk episode, the mockmentary episode, the reality TV episode, the superhero episode, the crime procedural episode, the romcom episode, the game show episode, the bedroom farce episode, the filmed-live episode, the found footage episode and constantly be unsure as to what SLIDERS is going to be each week.

And I think TF has really hit on something. What could a SLIDERS reboot do that no other show could without Torme and Weiss' lawyers going after it?