A highly proverbial Sliders Reboot/Continuation question on canon!

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Jerry, Sabrina, Cleavant and John could always play the parents of the new Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo.

It depends on what's happening:

Is Jerry instrumental in getting it done?  If so, I think Jerry is going to want to star in it.  He's going to want to be Quinn.  Making him Quinn's dad wouldn't be enough for him.  Maybe you make him Arturo?  I don't know if that works.  I think in that case, you do what Halloween did, what Terminator did, and what Jurassic Park did - the sequels didn't necessarily happen.  You pick up with the four sliders who have been sliding for 20 years or they've settled somewhere.  The Pilot happened but the rest of the adventures aren't important or didn't happen.

If Jerry isn't involved, I think you do a full reboot.  Get the original four to do cameos (like in Ghostbusters 2016) but no other attachment.  But, and it comes down to this, doing a full reboot of Sliders is needlessly expensive.  If you're going to do a story about people going from universe to universe, Sliders as a brand has too much baggage and not enough cultural power.  You don't have to deal with rights or fans.  Make Coasters with Danny, Jake, Annabel, and Dr. Whitman.  Change enough not to get sued and you can do whatever you want.

Transmodiar has told me that it's not appropriate for me to discuss his inner thinking in this forum, so I'm going to leave that to him -- but I will confess that for my own personal reasons, I too am okay with SLIDERS not coming back. SLIDERS was an intensely personal trauma for me that I worked through on my own intensely personal terms. When the Professor died, I was 10 and it was like seeing my own father die. Everything in my life since then has been a reaction to the death of Professor Arturo and when I brought him back to life in "Slide Effects" and later again in SLIDERS REBORN, something changed in me -- for the better, I think. If SLIDERS came back, I would be starting that journey again -- albeit on a parallel track.

However. I would like SLIDERS to come back for the fans, for Temporal Flux, for Slider_Quinn21 and for Informant and SLIDERS should come back for the people who miss it rather than stay away for the people who don't, if that makes any sense. And it is for the people who want it back that I would like Quinn to be played by Corey Fogelmanis (geekboy Farkle on GIRL MEETS WORLD), Wade to be played by Isabel May (hyperactive Katie on ALEXA AND KATIE), Rembrandt to be played by Levar Burton (you know who he is) and Arturo to be played by David Warner (look him up).

Seems like a lot of you would be interested in what I'm working on.

The genius of Sliders is that everything is potentially part of their multi-verse.  So, yeah, a reboot could run across any or all of the old Sliders either together or separately.  They could revisit the world with living flames or Caffeine World or Einstein World or whatever.

Yeah I was going to say the same thing.  They've already established that time moves differently on different worlds and that people can be the same person and look differently.  It can be a complete reboot in every way and still be part of the continuity.

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?

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.

It seems unlikely that a cell phone from one world would work on the network of another. Maybe they would sometimes and not others, as the plot demands.

Peacock is planning a new Battlestar Galactica for their service, and that’s likely not cheap.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/ba … ease-date/

When I sat down to write a spinoff/sequel series to Earth 214 (which I never got passed a half-written pilot and a plan for season 1), one of the ideas I liked was the idea of putting "satellites" in the wormhole to communicate from world to world (with the idea being that wormholes are a river connecting two worlds but that there's a bigger "ocean" that connects them all).

Might be a dumb idea, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work in the continuity of Sliders to allow them to communicate with each other no matter where they are.

Perhaps the Sliders could be using borrowed Kromagg technology to communicate

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 just finished an episode where the legendary Sydney Tamiia Poitier catches Jerry in a very vulnerable moment and Jerry plays this scene very well without all the artifice and mugging that he usually engages in for Harley.

Jerry constantly highlights how Harley is smiling, chattering and asserting authority and expertise but falsely and pretending. Acting is not about pretending. Acting is about presenting emotional truth in fictional contexts and Harley Carter does not present truth except in these few isolated scenes where Jerry tones down Harley Carter's antics.

I could certainly be persuaded that Jerry O'Connell is performing Harley as a bad actor.

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'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.

I forgot to mention: in the first two episodes of CARTER’s second season, Jerry seems to randomly improvise “sliders” in his dialogue with Harley Carter being oddly fixated on the mini-hamburger snack during his inane chatter. It seems to be on Jerry’s mind.

I would tune in if channel solely to catch a glimpse or too of Stana Katic, otherwise gahhhhhh, what trash!

Honestly, I cannot watch a series that doesn't have continuity anymore, I feel as though I'm just wasting my time.  Been that way for many, many years.

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.

Well, I don't think there are two visions between John and Jerry. Despite the brilliance of Jerry's NARCOTICA comic book, Jerry's creative ambitions with every product he's produced have been simply to spend time with his friends. That's why he brought Charlie into Season 4. That's why he wants SLIDERS back now; he wants to hang out with John and Sabrina and Cleavant. It's very obvious from his work on CARTER that Jerry just really likes his co-stars. If SLIDERS were revived as a half-hour series about a hamburger restaurant with Arturo managing the place, Wade on the register, Rembrandt on the grill and Quinn manning the drive-thru, Jerry would take it.

So it's really just John's vision and what he would want to do as Arturo and I think Jerry would go along with whatever John wanted to do.