That may have been true when this thread first started in March 2021. It's now September 2022 and I think we have to conclude that Tracy Torme's noble and brilliant efforts have stalled. The last report he gave was that NBCUniversal asked him for a SLIDERS revival pitch, he provided one and NBCUniversal asked: "What makes this the right time for a SLIDERS reboot?"
The question flummoxed Torme as they'd asked him for one and were then asking him to explain why he was pitching a project at their own request. NBCUniversal suggested they meet again at a later date to further explore a SLIDERS revival. The nuance suggested by SLIDERS commentator Annie Fish which may or may not be true: NBCUniversal was politely refusing Torme's pitch for any number of reasons: that Torme has a reputation for being "difficult", that only two of the original four sliders are currently pursuing acting projects, that NBCU is in no financial position to revive a television series that probably just broke even the first time, that Torme's pitch was not the clean-MACGYVER style reboot they expected but instead a QUANTUM LEAP/X-FILES style continuity revival that would, fairly or fairly, make the general audience think it was a product strictly for existing SLIDERS fans.
Fish remarked that in Hollywood, "Let's discuss this again at a later date" is a polite way to say, "Stay the hell away from me I never want to see you again I will call security if you don't leave the premises right now restraining orders are being drawn up." Is Fish right? I dunno.
I have all the love and respect in the world for Tracy Torme being insistent on reviving SLIDERS with *the* sliders; it's clearly the only version of SLIDERS he really wanted to write and someone else can always pitch the reboot-recast version of the show. SLIDERS is Tracy Torme's show and it's up to him how he wants to pitch it and it's not for me or anyone, really, to tell him that he shouldn't. I feel the same way about Chris Carter's incomprehensible X-FILES revival: it was his right to pitch a nonsensically incoherent two season X-FILES relaunch, it was FOX's right to greenlight it, and it's my right to watch the actual episodes and find them to be shockingly incompetent -- but until something actually airs, it's not for me to tell Torme he was wrong to handle his own property as he saw fit.
I can only say that a revival with Jerry O'Connell and Cleavant Derricks with Sabrina Lloyd and John Rhys-Davies likely only to guest-star and Torme's continuity being selective in what is and isn't canon to end the show around "The Guardian" -- well, it ran the risk of being confusing to the general audience and possibly to NBCU executives. In contrast, QUANTUM LEAP was a really successful show that was widely seen and remembered and the revival is being presented as something that requires no previous knowledge of QUANTUM LEAP; even if the REWATCH PODCAST hadn't given me a complete and near-total comprehension of the QL mythology, I would still feel the Raymond Lee relaunch would allow me to understand it.
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From 1989 to about 1999, DOCTOR WHO was primarily developed in novels as the BBC show was off the air. (1999 was when the audioplays started with the original actors at which point novels and audioplays became equal but separate contenders.)
There is a DOCTOR WHO novelist named Lance Parkin who wrote some very good and occasionally great DOCTOR WHO novels: "Just War" is about a war between a parallel universe where Rome never fell and a parallel universe where the Nazis won WWII, "Father Time" is about the immortal and galaxy-trotting Doctor trapped on Earth in the 1980s and adopting a little girl, "The Infinity Doctors" explores what would have been if the Doctor had never left his home planet, "Trading Futures" is the pacifist Doctor finding himself in a Bond-movie plot, "The Gallifrey Chronicles" is about the Doctor suffering from amnesia and discovering that he may have destroyed his home planet. Parkin's prose was terrific and he did a great job of writing the eccentric Doctor, but... his stories could sometimes devolve into a conventional action climax.
There is another DOCTOR WHO novelist named Lawrence Miles who sought to push the DW novel mythology to a new level, creating bold new ideas for time travel with highly conceptual-metatextual ideas for how the DW universe of overlapping timelines and realities functioned or didn't. While Miles' novels were excellent ("Alien Bodies" has the Doctor discovering a future war between the Time Lords and an unknown Enemy, "Interference" has the Doctor struggling with his inability to change real world injustices), he had a marked disinterest in writing the Doctor in DOCTOR WHO and instead seemed more interested in his original characters despite his obvious brilliance. Miles would later start his own spinoff series, FACTION PARADOX.
There was another DOCTOR WHO novelist, the late Craig Hinton who coined the term "fanwank" because he wrote the novel "The Quantum Archangel" which was written as a sequel to 12 different DOCTOR WHO TV episodes and novels, deliberately to see how many pieces of DW he could link together and how many continuity errors he could explain in a media tie-in novel. "The Quantum Archangel" wasn't the only novel Hinton wrote, but it is the most prominent because it represents fan continuity obsession at its peak, presented in the form of a mass market paperback published by the BBC. Some mocked it for being overly insular, but given the nature of media tie-ins is to tie into other media, this may be unreasonable.
However, at a time when Lance Parkin and Lawrence Miles were producing books that were excellent literature and excellent DOCTOR WHO novels, a DOCTOR WHO novel that was 'only' a DOCTOR WHO novel seemed a little pale by comparison.
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In SLIDERS, I think all fanfic writers have tried to be Lance Parkin and Lawrence Miles at some point. I would say that Nigel Mitchell and Mike Truman are the Lance Parkins of SLIDERS and I wanted to be Lawrence Miles, but my obsession with continuity and pastiching the voices of the actors meant I just ended up Craig Hinton. Most SLIDERS fan writers are Craig Hintons.
Ultimately, Lance Parkin, Lawrence Miles and Craig Hinton were only producing DOCTOR WHO stories that could reach already-existing DOCTOR WHO fans. Who is SLIDERS' version of Russell T. Davies? Who can bring SLIDERS into the mainstream? Who can make SLIDERS as beloved by the public as iCARLY?
Davies wrote and produced a lot of TV; he had written one DOCTOR WHO novel ("Damaged Goods"), but he made the bulk of his career outside DW in TV before coming to DW.
Who is a powerful creator with whom studios want to work? A creator who is a fan of SLIDERS, a creator who would accept lower pay for shepherding someone else's property instead of creating and selling his own? It would have to be someone with a profile like Tina Fey (MEAN GIRLS) or the Duffer Brothers (STRANGER THINGS) or Ryan Murphy (AMERICAN HORROR STORY). Does this person exist? And if this person doesn't exist, can we create them?
