It wasn't a couple of seasons. It was at the start of season 2 -- and season 1 was only 10 episodes. That wasn't remotely enough time for the format to be explored to its full potential, let alone run out of juice.
Honestly I don't think you'd need more than 12 episodes for the novelty to wear of and that premise to grow stale.
And I don't buy the idea that a show's core premise and worldbuilding have to be changed to keep it from getting "stale." How many murder mystery shows or police procedurals or courtroom dramas have run for hundreds of episodes with the exact same format? Perry Mason didn't have to start defending vampires and werewolves to hold an audience. The CSI team didn't have to develop psychic powers or time-travel. Why should science fiction be held to a different standard than mainstream programming? Why shouldn't it be allowed the same integrity in its premises?
Well..
First of all, in case you haven't noticed, I'm the person who constantly rages against episodes like "A Fistful of Datas" or subplots like Janeways' Turn of Screw/Jane Eyre mashup (and even against the Oh SO Beloved "Far Beyond the Stars") pastiche because I think SciFi should be allowed its premise without any "breaks from the usual setting" or genre shifts. (as in I think DS9 should have done an episode about racism within the DS9 setting)
Second of all: Well there's a reason I don't watch crime/police procedurals. In fact, in my opinion "they fight crime" is the laziest premise there is. In fact including vampires, werewolves, psychic powers and such would be the only way to make me watch them.
And Third: From what i understand a lot of people watch crime/police procedurals because they enjoy the character, and again the original four characters in sliders were boring and they didn't really improve much from what I remember.
And finally...if you look at most SciFi and/or Fantasy/Genre shows Star Trek, BSG, Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena and the Adventures of Hercules, the various Star Wars shows, Avatar: the Legend of Aang, Sapphire and Steel, Ocean Girl, Space Cases, even Charmed as clueless as it was (or is in the case of the reboot) they all build a strong setting, mythology and a clear sense what the characters are actively doing. What do you have in the original concept for Sliders? Four people who blunder from one world to the next without agency in where they go, react to whatever problems they encounter (and being mistaken for their counter-parts)and, basically just stay alive with their only goal (going home) being unobtainable, because it would end the series. Where are we Gilligan's Island? And who cares what they do in each of the endless worlds they visit, none of it matters because at the end they slide into the next world.
That's why I mentioned Exiles, because there at least was an active reason why the characters were visiting alternate worlds.
If anything, what happened to Sliders, M.A.N.T.I.S., SeaQuest DSV, and other such shows was the reverse of that.
I have no idea what MANTIS and SeaQuest DSV are, sorry, I'm not American and not all American media is always easily available to the rest of the world. I'm sure those shows aired in the countries I lived in at some point, but never at a point where I would have seen them.
I was strictly talking about Sliders and the problems I had with it when i saw it.
Oh, they had a number of recurring characters, in the sense that they kept meeting different doppelgangers of the same people. And story arcs were not a requirement back then. The norm was to have episodic plots with character-development arcs.
But in comparison to proper recurring characters, these dopplegangers couldn't create long-lasting relationships and histories with the main characters, since (barring the dopplegangers meeting alternate versions of the main characters, which I'm sure happened) for them it was always the first time they met the MCs. So in that way their usage was limited and they really weren't recurring characters, just dopplegangers.
As to arcs not being necessary...maybe not always, but even in TNG we knew the Borg were out there, the Romulans, the Klingons etc. And we knew they might pop out at any time, or Q, Lwaxana etc. Same with Doctor Who and the Daleks/Master/Cybermen.
Sliders, in its "unaltered" form that 100% stuck to its origins premise had.....nothing.
Kromaggs, derived from Cro-Magnon -- which didn't really make sense, since Cro-Magnons were modern humans, i.e. our own species. However, there were two different takes on the Kromaggs. There was the single episode in season 2 that wasn't very good and wasn't followed up on, and then there was their return in the much better-written seasons 4 and 5, with a completely new approach to the species and a new makeup design, making them less like monsters and more like the show's version of Klingons.
So it's even stupider than I remember. But well, again, as stupid as the whole thing was, at least it gave the show some direction instead of just endlessly falling through the worlds without end with no obtainable goal beyond basic survival.
