Renewed for a second season per Deadline. Article says that 10.8 million people watch the show via streaming services.
Will Sam Beckett Return Home? NBC Orders Quantum Leap Reboot Pilot
- Thread starter Ryan Thomas Riddle
- Start date
I assure you, this one will not last for 10+ seasons.
It's charming.
Sam saves baby Ben from evil leapers...
Or Ben leaps into baby Ben and saves himself?
A while back I imagined Troian Bellisario, from Pretty little liars, who I saw on celebrity Jeopardy a month ago, was going to revive the ip somehow.
It's already been renewed for a second, and the ratings have been pretty steady. Few shows ever make it to double-digit seasons, but it's too early to make any assumptions about how long this one might run.
As for this week's episode, it wasn't bad, but again we get the cliche of episodic-serial hybrids where the Case of the Week always just coincidentally happens to resonate perfectly with the lead characters' personal issues that week. Also, for a show set in the 1970s, it's a bit incongruous how casual all the characters were with the idea of an interracial romance between the white singer and her black bodyguard. Not that it wasn't known to happen, but it was still seen as a controversial subject, and two people considering such a relationship would've at least had reason to discuss the issue, as would their friends.
On a more minor note, how the heck does Addison sit down on a crate when she's intangible? I assume the Imaging Chamber aligns the hologram so her feet are on the floor, but what is she sitting on?
Also: "We can't change the past," says man whose entire mission is changing the past.
I'm enjoying the show. At first I so badly wanted to have a resolution to the Sam Beckett story with this show (and still do kinda). But I'm intrigued by the story arcs they've started. The inclusion of Magic is great and a nostalgic nod. When they said that it looked like Ben was building momentum to leap to a certain point in time I was hoping it might be related to Sam but alas it looks like it isn't. But the way that arc is unfolding I still find it interesting. I particularly find the whole Janis Calavicci story fun and extremely nostalgic. I look forward to what reveals we learn there each week. Also, the stories introducing another leaper during the first part of the season is another arc I find interesting. In QL 1.0 I liked the Evil Leaper story line and would like to have seen where that could have gone. So for me, this fraction of a season has given the new show a number of interesting plots to explore and have fun with. Before it started I was a nay sayer and thought it would make the episodes "too busy" dealing with the leap and whatever else they wanted to cover in the present. But now, I'm really enjoying it.
They got Jessica from True Blood to play the pop star. (Karen from Daredevil.)
Smart.
Smart.
I still feel that story already had a resolution. Sam chose to keep leaping on purpose, under his own control. His quest for home ended, not because he got home, but because he chose a different goal. A resolution doesn't have to mean an ending -- it can be a new beginning.
Still, that doesn't mean the show won't bring Sam into it at some point. We still don't know what the danger to Addison is, or why Ben went to Janis instead of his team. There are still layers to the mystery to peel back, so it could still be building toward something connected to Sam Beckett.
Addison sits on the same thing Al sat on whenever HE was in a chair of a car that Sam drove. Funny thing is, the Imaging Chamber in the new show is shown to have a small, elevated platform that Addison is standing on - there's nowhere for her to sit, let alone walk around, and she does just that in the premiere episode. The IC in the original show is seen to be a large nondescript blue space but at least had the square footage for Al to walk around if he needed to, including to the door (which is the one effect I really miss in the new show).
The new QL reminds me a lot of other "lone cowboy" shows post Quantum Leap, that had a two-story formulaic bent to them. "The Pretender" from the mid 90s is one of them, featuring the titular Pretender travelling around the US and dropping in with exactly the right skill set and identity for the plot at hand. This also had drama with the people left behind at "The Center" he escaped from, trying to track him down, and rarely interacting with him. This extends back through other similar shows like The Incredible Hulk, The A-Team, and probably as far back as The Questor Tapes and Kung Fu. Then there're are similar formula shows that DO involve time travel, like Time Trax and Journeyman, though these two had less to do with a second parallel plot running concurrent to the main hero's. In this sense the new QL is aping a tried-and-true formula, but not the same one as classic QL.
This week, we see that they are keeping things relatively tight in tracking what's going on: they establish that Ben was on his ninth leap, and continue the story with Janis. They clearly do have a plan for the season, and I hope that they have a loose arc that will extend through the second and they apparently got their renewal before finishing filming on the first. The way the show is made, is that the past storyline becomes a framework to base the main arc on without too much consequence in most episodes - it can be a generic drama of any kind, while the 2022 story moves forward from week to week. Time (sic) will tell if this provides an adequate playground for the writers to come up with sufficient, wide-spectrum storytelling to keep more people happy, but it seems to be a decent direction now that they're finding a balance between the two stories.
Mark
The new QL reminds me a lot of other "lone cowboy" shows post Quantum Leap, that had a two-story formulaic bent to them. "The Pretender" from the mid 90s is one of them, featuring the titular Pretender travelling around the US and dropping in with exactly the right skill set and identity for the plot at hand. This also had drama with the people left behind at "The Center" he escaped from, trying to track him down, and rarely interacting with him. This extends back through other similar shows like The Incredible Hulk, The A-Team, and probably as far back as The Questor Tapes and Kung Fu. Then there're are similar formula shows that DO involve time travel, like Time Trax and Journeyman, though these two had less to do with a second parallel plot running concurrent to the main hero's. In this sense the new QL is aping a tried-and-true formula, but not the same one as classic QL.
This week, we see that they are keeping things relatively tight in tracking what's going on: they establish that Ben was on his ninth leap, and continue the story with Janis. They clearly do have a plan for the season, and I hope that they have a loose arc that will extend through the second and they apparently got their renewal before finishing filming on the first. The way the show is made, is that the past storyline becomes a framework to base the main arc on without too much consequence in most episodes - it can be a generic drama of any kind, while the 2022 story moves forward from week to week. Time (sic) will tell if this provides an adequate playground for the writers to come up with sufficient, wide-spectrum storytelling to keep more people happy, but it seems to be a decent direction now that they're finding a balance between the two stories.
Mark
No, not really. In Hulk, there were a handful of episodes that focused on Jack McGee at the National Register, but only very few. The only recurring Register character other than McGee was his editor Mark Roberts (Walter Brooke), who was in only three episodes. Usually we only saw McGee working alone in the field, pursuing the Hulk or "John Doe," and there were plenty of episodes where he didn't appear.
Similarly, the A-Team did have a recurring pursuer or two, but they weren't focused on equally to the main team. In Kung Fu, Caine was a fugitive on the move, but there was no regular or recurring pursuer character. So they didn't have the dual-plot dynamic you're talking about.
And The Questor Tapes was just a pilot movie, and the main pursuer character didn't survive the ending. The network did want to retool the premise to undo the ending and turn it into a Fugitive clone rather than the show Roddenberry wanted (a show about Questor and Jerry using their high-tech alien resources to help humanity, basically his third stab at the "Assignment: Earth" concept with Questor replacing Gary Seven), but Roddenberry killed the show rather than let that happen. So there's no way to know whether there would've been a regular pursuer character or group.
A good example might have been the 1972 series Search, which was about a high-tech security/investigation company that had an agent in the field and a team back at HQ monitoring and supporting him with advanced tech, anticipating the "guy in the chair" dynamic that's so common in modern shows. Maybe Knight Rider works too, since Michael and KITT had the FLAG support team tagging along in their semi-truck HQ.
Yes, thanks for the elucidation. The whole "support team" thing is what I'm trying to draw parallels to, whether they're out to help or hinder the protagonist in whatever they're doing. "The Fugitive" is really what it's about then, though I was remembering "Hulk" more for the comics' General Ross and his pursuit / blame of Banner's episodic exploits. "The Pretender" as a parallel still rings close, IMO.
One does wonder whether or not anyone else can be an Observer at some point, though. As it stands we've established that others besides Addison can listen in on whatever Ben's up to on monitor screens, and also more than once now we've seen Addison persist in the past after Ben leaps out. In the original, we've had occasional reference to others being in the chamber with Al, who had to mime whatever he was trying to communicate to Sam "discretely". Functionally, I wonder if this means we can have the whole team be in the same "place" as Ben eventually, even if only Addison can be seen by him.
And here's something I didn't clock before - on his second leap, one of Ben's fellow Atlantis astronauts is named Samantha Stratton. In the original show's pilot episode, Sam's first leapee is Tom Stratton, whose wife gives birth in 1956, naming their child... Samantha Stratton. "Atlantis" happens some 42 years later, and Samantha's actor Carly Pope is around that age. Coincidence..?
Mark
One does wonder whether or not anyone else can be an Observer at some point, though. As it stands we've established that others besides Addison can listen in on whatever Ben's up to on monitor screens, and also more than once now we've seen Addison persist in the past after Ben leaps out. In the original, we've had occasional reference to others being in the chamber with Al, who had to mime whatever he was trying to communicate to Sam "discretely". Functionally, I wonder if this means we can have the whole team be in the same "place" as Ben eventually, even if only Addison can be seen by him.
And here's something I didn't clock before - on his second leap, one of Ben's fellow Atlantis astronauts is named Samantha Stratton. In the original show's pilot episode, Sam's first leapee is Tom Stratton, whose wife gives birth in 1956, naming their child... Samantha Stratton. "Atlantis" happens some 42 years later, and Samantha's actor Carly Pope is around that age. Coincidence..?
Mark
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You're not the only one who misses the imaging chamber door
Early after the series started the notion of the home and always was discussed and the Pretender was exactly what I referenced so great minds and all that
And I guess things have settled so that we don't have the issue where perhaps the 2022 team is a bit too large.
Yeah, the Hulk TV series had no comics characters in it other than Banner/Hulk himself.
As for The Fugitive, there wasn't a team, just Kimble being chased by Lt. Gerard. Maybe you're thinking of the movie version, which was much more of an action thriller than the original series.
Oh, yes. This week we saw Addison hit "Mute" on the handlink so she could talk privately with Ben.
Right, I was wondering about that -- how can she stay? They should lose the lock once Ben leaps. Well, maybe there's a bit of lag before that happens. It certainly takes a hell of a lot longer to leap out after the goal is achieved than it did in the old series. Whatever force is controlling the leaps is very accommodating of Ben and Addison's denouement conversations.
I think I read that was intentional.
You're not the only one who misses the imaging chamber door
I noticed today that when Addison's hologram appeared, her image "swept" into view from top to bottom, emulating the chamber door effect from the original. So it's not quite the same, but there is a nod to it. I agree, though -- I miss the rectangle of light and the sound of the sliding door.
Meh, this week's episode wasn't really all that great. Rather generic run of the mill stuff, a murder which on the surface seems to be open and shut, but of course the one who took the blame (the sister) is innocent, as is the one the episode tries to build up as most likely culprit (the singer's manager). At that point it's a simple process of elimination in that it can only be one of the singer's friends, pick out which one has the most dialogue, and presto, you have yourself a guilty party.
I did smile at Al's daughter commenting about her father's "bad fashion taste" which I interpreted as a dig at the original Quantum Leap's attempt at futurism, futuristic clothing in this case in the 1990s.
I did smile at Al's daughter commenting about her father's "bad fashion taste" which I interpreted as a dig at the original Quantum Leap's attempt at futurism, futuristic clothing in this case in the 1990s.
Essentially, yeah, but I didn't really notice which of the other characters had the biggest part. They all just sort of blended together for me.
But the murder mystery wasn't the real point of the story. It was more about the reconciliation of Carly and her sister, and Addison's anger at Ben not trusting her with the truth.
No, it was just a reference to Al's own loud, garish fashion sense, which was a recurring feature of his character, independent of the show's infrequent attempts at fashion futurism.
Although I noted that they avoided mentioning his other defining character trait, his lechery and womanizing.
My first thought was that it's the Congresswoman from episode 5. She has oversight over the project, she's an established character, and she's not one of the core cast.
I'm wondering if Ben needs to save Addison from... Herself? The only other candidate IMO is Magic somehow, as Jenn wasn't in catboots with Janis in the other story this week, and Ian seems to have been fighting Janis this whole time. There's also Martinez, who will likely be part of this dastardly plot. Ian seems convinced that Ben is trying to slingshot himself to some future time, and we currently think Martinez is from the future as well, so that dovetails.
Mark
Mark
Though notice how despite all the space: the door was never more than a step and a half away from wherever Al happened to be. No real point to make here, just noticing one of the quirks (like the magical seating) that you only notice if you stop and think about it, and quickly realise it's just a show and it doesn't matter!
