How would you feel if they did a reboot of the show?
If they bring back the original cast and creator, maybe. The show is an inverse of a reboot in a way - the main characters (a balancing act of archetypes) are the single grounding factor in new Earths that can be wildly different. Seasons 1 and 2 did excel, and some of 4 and 5 hold up well and I could argue that season 5 was a reboot already, given how it handled actor changes. A couple episodes of season 3 at most remain watchable, but 3 feels royally petered out (at best) and awful misfires as the norm.
One obvious problem is that Tracy Torme had recently passed
and he knew the guts of the show more than his replacements had and the show needs a deft creative handling.
I'd feel very cautious about this one having seen what happened to the Quantum Leap reboot. I really thought they had a good thing there but then it got cancelled due to ratings or whatever the reason was, I think it was declining ratings wasn't it?
Likely declining ratings. Most reboots rarely recapture the lightning in the bottle. Even shows with cast and production team changes at its core, effectively being mini-reboots constantly (e.g.
Doctor Who being the big success story in this regard), have to keep it all fresh and not derivative, coasting on nostalgia, or worse.
A shame nobody's tried to reboot 1982's
Voyagers! yet, where the alien dude with time travel technology takes a kid to help him do his homework and visit lots of Earth's history and if something gets mucked up they have to fix it (hmmm, that's not unlike QL, come to think of it...). Okay, the kid was even more annoying than Wesley Crusher and made the more experienced time-hopping adult the dingaling, but the show was aimed at kids first and foremost. (IMHO,
Sliders has more in common with that show than it ever had with
Quantum Leap, and most shows invariably take an idea and reuse it in a fresh and new way that feels innovative or original. Something
Sliders accomplished. The only parallel to QL I'd noticed was the color of the QL Doorway being blue or red for if the person involved was good or evil versus the Slider vortex being blue or red to denote our heroes versus the baddies.)
Anyway if they did try a new Sliders what would you like to see?
Tight actor and character chemistry and, I hate to say it, recreating the season 1 feel, as it balanced so many tropes (action, adventure, comedy, suspense, drama) with amazing ease. Season 2 ditched some of the comedy and worked. The less said of 3 the better.
Interestingly, 4 did return to some of season 1's style and nailed it, especially when not lumping in grand cliché nonsense of Quinn now retconned into "the chosen one" trope with the second-rate Kromaggs (though episodes light on "the chosen one" and using the Kromaggs did have a couple of robust stories.) Best of all, not since
Doctor Who has a TV show used creativity to replace the lead (season 5 has the worst finale of all time, but the opener was pretty cleverly done to explain cast changes. Which is a partial reboot in of itself.) Long story short, recapturing the format of season 1 and the good bits of season 4 would be true to the comparative uniqueness of this show.
The attempts at romance for the OG Quinn and Wade never felt developed, much less right - beyond one character having unrequited love for the other and exploring occasional what-ifs in specific episodes, rather than every week or overtaking the other elements and tropes of the show. Trouble is, as episodic tv is toast and all characters do adapt from experiences, there's no reset button for this and they could only work on that as an arc and then finish it and move on.
), but Kari was brought in for a new relationship-farming subplot as well as doing action work as Arturo was leaving (just when her breathing problem as character trait didn't become a plot point, which season 4 thankfully used better from what I recall). You'll also notice in season 3 that Quinn was looking less scruffy and more "hunky" too. Thankfully there's enough in their characters to keep them interesting. I can't watch a story just for the eye candy, which Sliders definitely had.
