For reference, here's Jerry's IG (https://www.instagram.com/mrjerryoc/)

CARTER calls out procedural tropes like detectives using guesswork and crime scene technicians performing days of analysis in minutes -- but then has them work as they would in any procedural.

One wishes for Danny Pudi's detailed acting and Abed spouting the procedural tropes he wants to re-enact as scripted by Dan Harmon -- except Jerry O'Connell is perfectly capable of all of that. Jerry could have played Abed. Jerry's hypermaniacal, goofball enthusiasm would be perfect to play a leading man obsessed with living the conventions of a detective show. But the scripting never sets up situations to show Carter trying to re-enact a scene only for reality to conflict.

Jerry is, I assume, completely familiar with the structure of police dramas after an astonishing NINETY-THREE appearances as Detective Woody Hoyt on CROSSING JORDAN and LAS VEGAS. Jerry's played a police officer more than he ever played Quinn Mallory and he is a very fine writer ("Narcotica" is a great comic). Jerry's fought more TV crime than you've fought colds.

Jerry should be completely capable of remoulding CARTER from the generic cop show that it groundlessly claims it isn't. He should offer a focused product where Carter is more interested in roleplaying as a detective with zingers, chase scenes, posing, costumes, slang and such than he is with solving crimes.

Why isn't CARTER better? Why isn't Jerry making CARTER better? My theory is that CARTER is an extremely low-budgeted show with showrunner Garry Campbell churning out scripts but distant from the set, meaning the writing isn't being tailored to capitalize on the actors' performances and hasn't been given the be refined and developed. It's made on a tight timeframe and budget with 10 episode seasons and not many calendar days to write and film it. The emphasis is on being functional and airable.

I don't think CARTER's a Season 5 of SLIDERS situation of witless half-assery; it's more like the end of Season 2 of SLIDERS' production where the cast and crew were extremely tired. "The Young and the Relentless" staggered into production with a decent standard of professionalism but limited energy. Jerry is likely filming 10 episodes of Carter a year between other commitments and doesn't have time to revise the writing. He's there to be on set, perform the scripts to the best of his ability and high-tail it back to LA to play Sheldon Cooper's brother, do voice acting as Superman and pester Torme and NBC about SLIDERS.

CARTER strikes me as a faded photocopy of another mediocre cop show, PACIFIC HEAT. PACIFIC HEAT is animated, but it has the ARCHER-esque comedy towards cop shows that CARTER seems to want: PACIFIC HEAT opens with a team of police officers about to storm a building of criminals, but leading man Todd grumbles about who gets to say "lock and load" and protests wearing a helmet because he likes how his hair looks. After bursting into the building, Todd's partner Zac hesitates before a firefight to get a soda out of a vending machine. Todd barks out questions when interrogating people of interest, and when they answer, he has to ask them for a pen because he can't remember the addresses they've given him. En route to pursue a suspect, Todd gets distracted by a pretty girl, drives around in circles and gets lost.

PACIFIC HEAT shows its cop characters as frivolous and incompetent for comedy purposes; CARTER would have a reason for Jerry O'Connell's character to be so unprofessional.

It's funny. Jerry O'Connell once thought he'd be playing Spider-Man in globally released superhero blockbusters. Now he's proudly headlining an affable cable show that produces 10 episodes a year. It says something. It says that he has advanced to the John Rhys-Davies stage where, like John, he's never too proud to turn down smaller projects with good work (not great work, but good), not seeing TV and indie film as being beneath him, and never giving any script less than his all because for all of CARTER's many mediocrities, Jerry's performance is thoughtful and hyperenthused..

I was worried about watching Jerry in anything because I have such fondness for Quinn, but Jerry's performance as Carter is nothing like Quinn. Carter is a childish man of impulses who talks before he thinks and everything he says is regurgitated from a script for a generic cop show than the character presumably performed once as an actor. Jerry plays Carter as a manic innocent who doesn't entirely understand that reality has consequences because he has grown accustomed to living life on TV sets. Carter has nothing of Quinn's calculating intelligence or cunning; Jerry is careful to make Carter guileness without being foolish.

It's a performance from an actor who has thought through the material and done his best to put himself in it. This is a actor who is happy to be working. This is an actor who hopes for more but will settle for less and has made his wife and children his joy rather than any rewards from his career. This is a man who could lead a SLIDERS revival.

Anyway, CARTER's gimmick is that Carter (O'Connell) is an actor who plays a detective on TV and now he thinks he can be a detective in real life. It's at this point that I fail to grasp or explain what CARTER's joke is -- CARTER is a TV cop show where the lead cop character is... regularly informed that he is not actually a police officer at which point he... performs the role of a leading man in a cop show... and is reminded periodically that he is not really a police officer and... and... what?

I don't get it. CARTER seems to draw a lot of humour (?) from having characters comment on how Carter isn't the character he plays, but given that this is the only time we've ever seen Carter onscreen and have no scenes of him in his TV show, there is no comparison to be made. There's a lot of noise from this cop show about how life is not a cop show and it's blatantly hypocritical.

Certainly, not all roads of comedy lead to COMMUNITY, but when COMMUNITY did an homage to LAW AND ORDER, COMMUNITY had all the lead characters behaving with deadly serious demeanors as they systematically and analytically sought the truth in investigating the murder of... a smashed yam. At one point, Abed and Troy discuss a suspect behind plate glass and the suspect yells that the wall isn't actually soundproof and the glass isn't one-way. At another, Shirley admonishes Troy and Abed for overstepping, regarding them like a police chief character in a procedural as she intones, "You're not really cops." COMMUNITY took a very silly crime very, very seriously. With CARTER... it's really clueless as to what the joke is unless this is some sort of extended pisstake of Jerry's CROSSING JORDAN role (which I've never seen).

That said, Jerry O'Connell's performance is engaged and sober and he has tremendous charisma as a leading man. On one level, the joke (if there even is one) could be that despite having regularly been criticized for only playing himself, Jerry is mocking his own career trajectory as he plays Harley Carter, a Hollywood TV actor who is slightly less successful than Jerry O'Connell himself, somewhat past his prime and grudgingly accepting that he has to settle for less in his career.

However, the ending of the first episode suggests that Harley Carter became a fake detective because he couldn't be a real one in order to solve the disappearance of his mother when he was a child, a crazily exaggerated, irony-free revelation that Jerry plays with oddly stirring sincerity and... yeah, I'd agree that CARTER is not bad but surely humanity should aspire to heights beyond not bad.

Surely Jerry's talents would be put to better use playing Quinn Mallory in a SLIDERS revival.

Anyway. I'm going to offer a vision of a SLIDERS reboot done to Slider_Quinn21's specifications, built on ideas offered in this community, and I'll hope Slide Override won't be mean to me about it. This is a reboot, not a rebootquel, not a revival and it is an effort to do it in Transmodiar's style and play it completely straight.

No monsters! No crossovers! No superhero elements! No multiversal crises! No psychodrama! No Kromaggs! No continuity with the original show! Transmodiar won't have anything to complain about with this vision (aside from its existence). In fact, he will love it. The goal here is to make something Transmodiar would love.

Writing to Transmodiar's tastes has been a really fulfilling exercise. Maybe... maybe I'm now equipped to write original fiction.

Too bad I can't read any of this for reasons that are obvious to you!

Ireaction psychoanalyzing aside, I really enjoyed that podcast/interview very insightful on both Jerry and Macaulay I can understand a lot more of their life choices. It is kinda odd that no one has ever bought Jerry a slider until that interview.

Specifically, that's armchair psychoanalysis, a term which specifically emphasizes how the analyst is amateur, untrained, unaccredited and has no professional grounds on which to offer any genuine assessment whatsoever.

His latest show, Carter, is not bad

I also noticed his almost Pavlovian reaction to being described as "the fat kid from STAND BY ME" where he nearly shrieks (somewhat jokingly but not) that he was "husky." It reminds me of that episode of COMMUNITY where Jeff tells Annie, "YOU -- are insecure. Because you didn't get hot until AFTER high school," a remark that seems true of Jerry O'Connell and explains his post-SLIDERS choices in roles (BODY SHOTS, MISSION TO MARS, TOMCATS, and KANGAROO JACK) where his character was defined largely by being an attractive young man, and something he didn't cast off for years.

It was also intriguing to hear Jerry's voice describing a science of sorts -- the science of acting and auditioning and for a moment, if one imagined Quinn pursuing acting instead of quantum mechanics, this would be the sort of thing Quinn would talk about and the way in which he would describe it.

I haven't been overly keen on Jerry for many, many, many reasons, but I have felt in recent years that his acting his regained the skill he seemed to lose after John Rhys-Davies was fired, and I really liked hearing a Quinn-adjacent voice in this podcast.

Jerry and Mac Culkin chat while munching on "Sliders."

Uploaded with surfmypictures

Starts goofing about Sliders around 30 minutes in.

Grizzlor wrote:

I would counter Transmodiar's angst over Sliders baggage though, as probably 0.0001% of viewers have any clue what went on BTS during the show like we do.

You do realize that 99% of the people most clamoring for a reboot are either here or were on the BBoard back in the day? Sliders doesn't have a lot of casual fans; that's why it a reboot against the "brand" doesn't make sense aside from cynically mining pre-existing titles to try and drum up an audience high on nostalgia.

touché!