Kliss: I'm Half-Obsessed with Sliders

Welcome aboard!

We don't know if there's going to be a reboot. There has been an icy silence on the subject. Jerry O'Connell and John Rhys-Davies were investigating it. So far, the problem seems to be ownership: NBCUniversal should, in theory, own the rights to SLIDERS.

But SLIDERS expert Temporal Flux, the de facto authority on the show, has observed: SLIDERS was also produced by St. Clare Entertainment. St. Clare Entertainment is now defunct, but it would have owned 33 per cent of SLIDERS which is now split across Robert K. Weiss (the co-creator), John Landis and Leslie Belzberg. NBCUniversal may need to come to an agreement with all three parties separately, a series of legal challenges that may be too troublesome to explore.

The other issue I would take with a reboot on a strictly personal level that is in no way representative of SLIDERS fans: after 19 years of fully obsessing over SLIDERS (as opposed to half-obsessing) -- I have come to the conclusion that SLIDERS is about THE sliders -- Quinn Mallory, Wade Welles, Rembrandt Brown and Professor Arturo as portrayed by Jerry O'Connell, Sabrina Lloyd, Cleavant Derricks and John Rhys-Davies.

If you read the scripts, the characters are defined in very general terms and it's the synthesis of scripted dialogue and actors' interpretations that make them whole. Quinn, on paper, was a socially awkward nerd who lived in his head; Jerry O'Connell transformed him into a traumatized, self-isolating athlete. Wade was a girl with a crush; Lloyd made her a social crusader. Rembrandt was an inept coward; Cleavant built Rembrandt into comedic picture of trauma that made Remmy's torment funny instead of cruel. Arturo was an insecure wreck; Rhys-Davies played Arturo as the father figure of the group. Certainly, the writers eventually capitalized on what the actors brought in.

But if your reboot has other actors as Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo, you're creating new characters at which point, a studio is likely to wonder -- why reboot SLIDERS at all?

Why not come up with a new title and a new set of characters exploring parallel universes? Why not create an original work about alternate histories that doesn't rely on paying royalties to the original creators and including them in the creative process? Why not produce a new series that doesn't require facing all these legal challenges? Especially when a reboot, even if it uses the old titles and names, is effectively a new series with new characters?

And yet -- the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA reboot might as well have had different character names and a different title. MACGYVER was rebooted with Lucas Till and MACGYVER's original show is very much like SLIDERS: the original intent for the character is very distant from the onscreen results. Originally, MACGYVER was supposed to be a Richard Dean Anderson adventure show featuring a cocky hotshot named MacGyver in action stories depicted in real-time.

The pilot episode was set in a single location to facilitate that, necessitating MacGyver using whatever objects were available to fashion solutions to his problems for this opening story as a plotting necessity. The real-time element was dropped from the series; the use of everyday objects remained in the pilot and was then heightened as the defining aspect of the show while Anderson changed the characterization in his performance from arrogant to humble. All that was an accident -- and the reboot has sought to deliberately and precisely recreate what the actor and writers stumbled into unwittingly.

However, MACGYVER was a cultural force to be reckoned with. BATTLESTAR GALACTICA had a certain brand value that I'm not sure SLIDERS does for the general audience. And yet -- these things can be built and rebuilt.

THE X-FILES is synonymous with paranormal investigations. MACGYVER is a brand for do-it-yourself cleverness and espionage. BATTLESTAR GALACTICA is a brand for space opera. THE MATRIX is a brand for virtual reality. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE is a brand for crazy espionage stunts. BOND is a brand for men's fashion and lifestyle.

Could NBCUniversal and whatever wreckage of St. Clare Entertainment exists make SLIDERS a brand name for parallel worlds?

It's not impossible, but it currently looks difficult to the point where studios and networks might decline to bother.

Selfishly, I would like SLIDERS to be left alone as it is now. But I must not be selfish and instead hope that SLIDERS will somehow return and delight and inspire a new generation of fans and preferably make it through five seasons without losing three-quarters of its cast and being disavowed by its creators.

The traditional (but not universal) arrangement: show creators own 10 per cent of the franchise. It's not a controlling stake; it entitles them to consultancy (the way Torme had an Executive Consultant credit on Seasons 4 - 5 but no control over the show) and a cut of the profits. Torme, as far as I can tell, was not a co-owner in St. Clare Entertainment; that was Robert K. Weiss, John Landis and Leslie Belzberg.

All three members of St. Clare Entertainment ceased to have an active creative role in SLIDERS after the first season due to other commitments. I would speculate that Weiss, in addition to owning 11.1 per cent of SLIDERS via St. Clare Entertainment, also owns 5 per cent via the 10 per cent he'd (presumably) share with Torme or that creator's 10 per cent is folded into St. Clare Entertainment.

Please note that this is entirely speculative on my part.

I don't think there is any story reason to prevent the original cast from returning to SLIDERS, but there could be marketing and situational reasons to impede it. Sabrina Lloyd seems to have stepped back from acting to travel and focus on family. Jerry O'Connell thinks SLIDERS would be best with a young, new cast rather than having him headline the show. A studio and network, if they wanted to reboot SLIDERS, would likely want to start over with Quinn and Wade played by actors from ages 21 - 25 and Rembrandt and Arturo played by actors between the ages of 40 - 50 -- just to get a good, long run out of them should the opportunity present itself.

That said, in 2000, Temporal Flux came up with a very clever way to both reboot SLIDERS and feature the original actors playing their original roles while discovering sliding for the first time. The EarthPrime.com webmaster, Transmodiar, subsequently came up with a very clever way to retrofit this story idea so that the characters wouldn't be doubles but instead the original characters we met in the Pilot -- and yet, still stepping into the vortex for the first time. You can read it here. http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=8527#p8527

As for the original cast and how the changes affected the show -- I've said all this before, but for awhile, Transmodiar and I had a debate between us. I took the view that SLIDERS losing the chemistry of Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo rendered SLIDERS pointless because I watched the show to hang out with my four friends.

Transmodiar pointed out that the original cast is hardly a marker of quality given episodes like the incomprehensible "Time and Again World," the energy-sapped "The Good, the Bad and the Wealthy," the noticeably underwritten "El Sid" which seems to be short by about 15 - 20 pages of script. Most alarmingly, there's the escape-capture repetition of "Love Gods" which seems like it was written by a computer program producing script pages through an algorithm.

Transmodiar insists that he's had lunch with Paul Jackson and that these are real people. I remain suspicious and have graduated to suspecting that Transmodiar may in fact be a 90s-era artificial intelligence. He also felt that Seasons 4 - 5 had many gems and that Charlie O'Connell found his feet while getting less and less to do, that Kari Wuhrer had a lot of charm and passion for Maggie and that episodes like "World Killer" and "The Return of Maggie Beckett" and other strong entries show SLIDERS doesn't depend on Jerry, Cleavant, Sabrina and John to function properly.

Another fan, Slider_Quinn21 has gone so far as to say that while he's fond enough of the original cast, it's really the concept of exploring an new alternate history every week that carries the show, not any particular set of actors.

And this debate continued for years until Informant, a former member of this community, pointed out that SLIDERS is fundamentally about its concept but that its concept is intrinsically connected to the original cast.

While Earth Prime is subtly not our Earth (unless Berkeley's campus is now next to Golden Gate Park), it was sufficiently similar that Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo shared a common frame of reference with the audience. They could react to parallel worlds the way the audience would react. Informant observed that with each character being removed from the cast, a central point of connection was lost. The Professor came from our world; his outraged frustration and confusion with parallel Earths spoke to and for the audience.

Maggie does not come from our world or anything like our world; we have no sense of what Maggie's perception of normalcy even is, so we can't react with her and feel like we're on a journey with her. This problem reached another low point in Season 4, Informant said, when Earth Prime was invaded by Kromaggs. There was no Kromagg invasion in our world, so now Quinn and Rembrandt were no longer characters the audience could connect to with a common frame of reference.

However, none of this in any way prevents a MACGYVER style reboot with new actors playing the sliders who would, ideally, come from 'our' world and never find their home Earth invaded by Kromaggs or have their backstories retcon them into Kal-El of ****ing Kromagg Prime.

I'm not sure what's worse, making Quinn a mythic chosen one in an interdimensional war or HIGHLANDER II revealing that immortals are aliens from the planet Zeist. I guess they're all trumped by the NINJA TURTLES comics revealing April O'Neil as a being of pure imagination created by a magic pen.

How do you mean?

They wanted to hire a Jerry O'Connell lookalike. They found one (although they sheared Floyd's hair so short that all of his facial similarities to Jerry were obliterated). Floyd was also a gifted mimic with an unnatural ability to recreate Jerry O'Connell's voice, body language, line deliveries, facial expressions and screen presence -- although production seemed unaware of this since they didn't have him record the dialogue for Quinn's, "Go! Go!" If you wanted to hire a talented actor who looked like Jerry and could sound like Jerry, Robert Floyd was the absolute best choice.

The mistake was allowing Jerry to leave. In American TV, all regular cast members sign multi-year contracts. David Duchovny was tired of THE X-FILES by Season 2; he was obligated to complete his seven season contract. If an actor leaves, it's either because they are no longer capable of performing their role (like WITCHBLADE where the lead actress going into rehab ended the show) or because, as was the case with SLIDERS, the network and studio were grossly incompetent.

The Sci-Fi Channel foolishly failed to budget for a fifth season of SLIDERS and their contract with Jerry expired before they found the money to renew the show. As a result, SLIDERS found itself needing to replace Jerry and they did so with great casting but an inept story editor who tied himself into knots to explain how Quinn's memories could be present in Robert Floyd's character but then jettisoned the Quinn character before the writers (and the actor) could capitalize further on the dramatic potential. That's writing and production, not casting.

Excellent. EXCELLENT.

For better or worse. And, by the way, I'm not some special snowflake for having a Rolodex of Sliders writers at my fingertips. All I did was write them through the WGA 15 (!) years ago and they wrote back. Believe it or not, television writers are usually not mega-celebs and will respond to fans. Even Tony Blake, who is a notorious sourpuss, wrote me back and talked a little about how much he hated the goddamn cave set.

Your suspicions... have merit.

I was highly inappropriate in the Reviving SLIDERS thread. The only things I should have said:

A revival of SLIDERS needs to make sense to a general audience who has never seen or heard of the show. It's called BROADcasting for a reason. These story ideas would be better suited to SLIDERS novels, comic books and audioplays than they would to general audience television. I'm going to start a new thread, Rebooting SLIDERS. Thank you.

I like pilight's idea of gender-swapping all the sliders, however. As with Starbuck on BATTLESTAR, it immediately makes it clear that Quinn Mallory, Wade Welles, Remi Brown and Maxine Arturo are reinterpretations rather than trying to pastiche previous performers.

It allows a rebooted, gender-flipped SLIDERS to have some continuity with the old show as the variation here is, as the Professor would put it, "the difference of an X chromosome and a Y chromosome." It allows for a neat reversal of the male-dominant original cast by altering it to three women and one man.

Just speaking on the subject of my view on the Revival thread ideas -- it's interesting to look at THE X-FILES which had two revivals. There was the Season 10 - 11 revival of 17 episodes. And there were the IDW comic books: THE X-FILES: SEASON 10 (25 issues), THE X-FILES: SEASON 11 (eight issues), THE X-FILES: CONSPIRACY (a Lone Gunmen series that ran six issues), THE X-FILES: YEAR ZERO (a five issue miniseries featuring the first X-Files investigation in 1946), and also MILLENNIUM (a five issue conclusion to the TV show with a guest-appearance from Fox Mulder).

The IDW comic books were, to be blunt, geeky stuff. They were professional fan fiction, very much like the ideas in the Reviving SLIDERS thread. I loved it all, loved how writer Joe Harris was stitching the mythology into something coherent and whole, resurrecting the deceased villains and restoring the paranoia and sense of forward motion that THE X-FILES once possessed. He revealed that the Lone Gunmen had faked their deaths, showed that the 2012 invasion had been stalled by a new faction, brought modern political forces into the old conspiracy -- but he also told stories that could not be understood by the average viewer. They were for fans.

In contrast, the TV revival of THE X-FILES was for a general audience. The mythology of Seasons 1 - 9 was summarized in a very vague, undetailed form that didn't require remembering it. Viewers who had never seen an episode of THE X-FILES could watch the Revival. That said, the Revival became convoluted and confusing due to poor script editing: Mulder and Scully were depicted as separated/living together, out of touch with FBI work/carrying out their duties like no time had passed, searching for William/never discussing him, facing a global contagion/never thinking about it.

However, the goal of the TV revival -- whether it was achieved or not -- was to create television that could be enjoyed whether you were watching your 201st episode or your first one -- which was not the goal of the comic books.

Any TV revival of SLIDERS will have to aim for the same goal as THE X-FILES revival. Comic books, novels and audioplays can aim for a more specific audience of 50,000; a TV show with such a scant audience won't survive.

I really like it too. TF transplanted the essence of who these characters were in the Pilot into older alternates. He has a beautiful vision for SLIDERS because he has both the sci-fi skills and a love and understanding of the characters. And Transmodiar was clever to find a way to change them from doubles to the originals.

Every 2 - 3 years, I update the outline. I think next year, Wade will have gone from a tech reviewer to a climate change activist and Rembrandt will be running an AI cafe where all the food and drink are made by robots that play jazz. Meanwhile, Quinn will be a tech support manager at Doppler Computers and the Professor teaches all his classes online via video link as he is banned from the Berkeley campus after an unfortunate incident involving a mayoral campaign, Pavarotti, bungee jumping, a barfight, and a woman named Ambrosia.

I have written exactly this story in a six part series of screenplays called SLIDERS REBORN at www.earthprime.com/reborn

• "Reprise" (1): Picking up from the end of "The Seer," we follow Rembrandt into the unstable vortex and find out what happened to him on the other side. A 4 page screenplay.

• "Reunion" (2): Twenty years after the Pilot and 15 years after "The Seer," we find Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo alive and well and home in 2015. The Kromagg invasion seems to have never happened. Quinn Mallory is missing. But when reality starts breaking down around one of Wade's students, Quinn reappears, regroups the original quartet and leads them on another adventure through the interdimension. 95 pages.

• "Revelation" (3): Across three parallel Earths, the original sliders search for answers as to why reality is beginning to collapse. The clues will lead them to a confrontation with the sliders' oldest enemy. 151 pages.

• "Reminiscence" (4): Set in 2001, this short novella is a transcript of Quinn in a mental institution being questioned by a psychiatrist. As Quinn explains his situation and tells the story of sliding, he explains how he, Wade and Arturo are alive, how the Kromagg invasion has been reversed, why the new sliders of Seasons 1 - 2 vanished, why Season 1 episodes aired in the wrong order, why monsters and magic appeared in Season 3, why Seasons 4 - 5 seemed stuck in the same sets, and why it was 1994 in the Pilot but suddenly 1995 in "Summer of Love."

• "Revolution" (5): Trapped in a burning building, Quinn Mallory finds that his only chance for survival is to ask for help from Quinn Mallory (as played by Robert Floyd). 46 pages.

• "Regenesis" (6): It all ends here in this 144 page script featuring Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt, Arturo, Maggie, Diana, Mallory, the breeder parasites, the super-intelligent snakes, the robots, the dinosaur, the animal-human hybrids, the giant scarab, the rock star vampires, the fat craving zombies, the remote controlled cars with laser cannons, the dragon and Hurley.

I had a lot of fun writing this series. I spent two years of my life writing it on evenings and weekends. And I really love it, but it is not a viable route for a general audience revival. SLIDERS REBORN is not a general audience story. When starting out, I really tried to make it entry level: a new audience viewpoint character, indirect resolutions to the Season 3 - 5 plots presented in the form of jokes much like the way FAMILY GUY makes reference to nonsensical, insane events depicted in short cutaways. But it didn't work; the jokes were too obscure and the plot resolutions demanded elaboration, so I embraced that and accepted that SLIDERS REBORN would not be suited to people unfamiliar with SLIDERS.

Even when trying to resolve the old material with humour and distance, the result is like the IDW X-FILES comic books. It's made for a very, very small number of people precisely because it addresses all these plots that only old fans want resolved. A new SLIDERS should be an entry level product like the STAR TREK rebootquel or DOCTOR WHO in 2005.

Reborn seems glorious I've read it mentionned several times here, but didn't know what it was about. I'll give it a go when I have the time but it's looong lol And I'm not the reader I used to be. But: I've just read the first part, and I can tell you know what you're doing which is nice.

Anyway I do agree with both of you. I don't expect it to be that way, and I don't think doing fanservice would be in the best interest of the show, not if interest = lucrativeness anyway.

I know I know, but I can still work on the other half. I'll take the hat, thanks