Interview - Robert Floyd Looks Back on SLIDERS!

An interesting guy!
I still have not watched Season 4 & 5 but if I do at some point I will endeavour to give him a fair shake and not prejudge his performances in them.
I wonder if he could ever be tempted back in to acting?
He seems happy in his new career and is undoubtedly successful so he does not need to or anything but I do wonder.
Acting is something of a Passion for those special few like JRD for example and Roberts investment in his performances as detailed in the interview are either that very Passion or at least an admirable amount of proffessionalism if not.

I agree 4 and 5 are not bad. Yeah a lot of the characters have bad fates, but the episodes are fun and good on their own for the most part.

The audio quality isn't terrific. I loaded up Skype on my tablet and dialed Rob's number. I plugged an audio cable into the tablet's jack and connected that to the microphone input on my voice recorder. So, it sounds like a Skype-quality call with a few moments of distortion -- fine for conversation, but I don't know how much you'd enjoy hearing it. This also records only Rob's end of the conversation. I had to record my end on the only other recording device I had -- my smartphone. And again, the audio quality is acceptable for conversation but not great for listening.

In the end, I transcribed both sides and put it together in a PDF (that's at the end of the web article), so if you want to read a mostly unedited version, it's there. I moved some of Rob's answers around a bit -- for example, he talked about why he left his acting career *before* we started talking about "The Seer," but I decided to move that to after his wishes for Season 6. There were also a couple instances where I lost the audio, but could get the gist of what he was saying -- basically that there were a lot of freelance scripts for Season 5 because of the small writing staff and it put a lot of pressure on the few staff writers.

There's also a bit at the end of the transcript where I started crying a little.

ROB FLOYD: "Are you watching GAME OF THRONES?"
ME: "Hmm. It’s not really my thing. I’m more into shows like THE FLASH."
ROB FLOYD: "Oh, yeah, yeah. I have not seen that, I'm going to marathon that too."
ME: "But I’ve heard lots of great things about GAME OF THRONES!"
ROB FLOYD: "Yeah. You know -- the effects -- I marathoned a lot of it last night and the effects are unbelievable! And I read the books too. I was thinking of the battle scenes and thinking so much was never done with the Kromaggs."
ME: "Yeah. Sci-Fi Channel budget. What can you do, right? I guess, for me -- TV is like a friend. It’s comfort. It’s there for you at your best and worst. And sometimes it has a bad day. And sometimes it loses three-quarters of the cast and gets the budget cut by a third and is dragged out for season after season for syndication while losing everything that made it special and failing to give great actors like you the material they deserve and then it gets cancelled and goes away forever. And-and-and-and -- and that’s okay. Because everything has to."
ROB FLOYD: " ...  oh. Right. Right."

Hmm. I'll see if I can edit it together. In other news:

From: ireactions | To: David Gerrold
Dear Mr. Gerrold. I recently interviewed Robert Floyd ("Mallory" from SLIDERS) and asked him: what was his favourite episode of SLIDERS? It was yours. Congratulations.

The one thing I'm really pleased about -- I'm glad we finally dealt with that ridiculous message board rumour that Rob approached the producers and asked them to delete Quinn from Mallory. It was a groundless, unsourced, and in some ways malicious remark and I'm glad I was able to ask Rob about it so he could definitively declare that to be untrue.

I don't see where it was forced. Rob has expressed his willingness to impersonate Jerry, described his skillful preparation in doing so and he was clearly capable of doing it. And they had a great angle: he wouldn't just be a copy of Jerry because the dual-identity would mean he would be his own character. Jerry never argued with himself in one body; Jerry never played a split consciousness. Season 5 had a great character arc and the perfect actor and then they lost it for some reason.

I think Season 5 had a lot of potential. Yeah, losing Jerry was a blow. But the truth is, Jerry had mentally quit the show by Season 3 anyway. The writers found a *very* interesting way to keep Quinn on the show even without Jerry. They had a really neat character arc for Diana Davis where the plan was for her to be secretly on Geiger's side for the whole season. The Season 5 cast was the best lineup for the show since Season 1/2. Rob, Tembi, Cleavant and Kari had a really terrific sense of chemistry and all four were very strong performers. The freelance scripts were also fantastic. An interdimensional library! Mind-controlled sliding machines! A mental asylum for the imaginative! A world where caffeine is illegal! A world with the customer service experience from hell!

And then, for various reasons, it was all very badly realized onscreen. The arcs for Quinn-2 and Diana were excised. All the freelance scripts were cut down for the budget, but they were cut down so *clumsily*. And the production continued to make bad choices: cutting episodic budgets to save up for an epic finale they didn't end up filming. Renting a huge hotel set that they then had to use in every episode that drained their funds for other expenses. The production kept aiming to do what was easy. And honestly, the budget isn't an excuse: DOCTOR WHO had even less money than Season 5 and generally managed to cobble things together.

Instead of maintaining a single standing set, Season 5 should have rented studio space that could be converted to different interiors -- hotels, train stations, cafes, military bases, bunkers, hallways. Episodes should have been rewritten to exist in 2 - 3 interior locations with dialogue indicating a vast world outside the studio walls. Exterior shots would need to be filmed tightly on the actors with different backgrounds wheeled in and out. The vortex should have stayed offscreen for most of the season, or they could have made a library of really close-up shots of the vortex that could be recoloured to match other shots. The sad truth is that the Season 5 writers and producers just weren't bringing their A-game.

I love Rob, but for the fans, SLIDERS was better off cancelled. And I disagree with the fans that the cliffhanger was a slap in the face. Ending on Rembrandt leaping into the vortex was the only meaningful gift the show had left to offer: the distant hope that something better would be on the other side -- something better than what the Season 5 creators could be bothered to give us.

On Jerry -- I think he was hungover on set in Season 4. I think it was the tail-end of a downward spiral. In Vancouver, Jerry lived like a normal guy. He went to work, went to the gym, went home, lived a quiet and low-key life. His attitude to acting was always been to play himself regardless of the role. He could get away with that because he had all the technical skills (memorization, hitting his marks, meeting his cues, blocking his scenes) and because he has a natural onscreen charisma. Match that with excellent scripting from S1/S2 writers and his reverence for John Rhys-Davies and John coaching him and Quinn came off as a multifaceted character.

Then Jerry moved to LA. It became all about the night life with making the show as something to do between binge drinking sessions, an attitude shared by the producers. Jerry continued to play himself and now Quinn was a smug, flirtatious, arrogant, brash screen presence and Jerry was only occasionally in character. And by Season 4, Jerry wouldn't even play that most of the time. He is clearly hungover in "Common Ground" and "My Brother's Keeper" and I think Charlie O'Connell, later revealed to be an alcoholic, was enabling him. The scripts in Season 4 were also terrible for Quinn: only in "World Killer" and "The Alternateville Horror" is Quinn scripted as an adventurous moral crusader who is delighted by big ideas; the rest portrayed Quinn as a bland action hero.

Season 5 -- I think that because the producers weren't expecting much, they also weren't asking much. So I guess it was an easy job working on that set and people were having fun making the show even if they weren't making anything good. I mean, you look at X-FILES episodes at the time and you have really ambitious direction and scripting whereas with SLIDERS, the visuals are just people jogging around beige hallways. I don't doubt it was fun to make; it just wasn't fun to watch.

I would have liked Robert Floyd to have played Quinn from the Pilot onward.