Poll Which is more popular: SeaQuest or Sliders?

[Guy Gardener]

Jerry has been told since puberty that he is super duper attractive, more so than he deserves, just because it was a surprise that he stopped being fat.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

As an aside, it did leave it as one of the few shows with a black lead and actually half the leads were black.

Neat. Gonna put that one next to such other '90s staples as Red Dwarf & Homicide: Life on the Street.

 

[JD]

I was reading about Seaquest on Wikipedia, and I found out it was created by Farscape creator Rockne S. O'Bannon. The only writing credit he has is the pilot, so I'm not sure how involved he was beyond that.

 

[Qonundrum]

I voted "Sliders" because I think it had far more potential and a lot more creativity. A show involving finding discarded plastic six-pack holsters would get boring after a while, though there was some potential in exploring the sea and possible creation of bases for colonization, etc.

Back to Sliders: Naturally, casual viewers couldn't figure out the premise that was spooned to them fairly heavyhandedly because a portal to a different dimension is apparently hard to understand, so they all thought the show was "commie ruskie propaganda" due to the 5 seconds of the pilot they sat through because they tuned in an hour late or whatever. SMH, still can't believe the backlash it got back then.Yet was nowhere near as bad as what MadTV and other bawdy sketch comedy shows got regarding "insensitivity" and "not PC" but lasted a lot longer, but whatever.

A few Orville episodes, with varying amounts of tweaks depending, would be robust Sliders material as well. At least season 1 or 2-worthy, where season 1 is a bit more adventure/actiony and season 2 is more heavy drama (not dissimilar to "Orville" as well, oddly.) Season 3 had a couple good episodes and a lot of mediocre or poor ones. Season 4 with the new network but not getting Torme back had the show becoming the "Let's turn Kromaggs from a highly intelligent and clever species into second rate Klingon-wannabes." Season 5 felt like a near-reboot, but was cleverly handled. A few good episodes had promise... then came the series finale (ugh, not since 'The Prisoner' did a solid TV show get such a bizarre, third-rate ending...)

 

[Qonundrum]

I've only seen a couple episodes of both shows. I barely remember anything about the SeaQuest episodes I saw but I still remember both of the Sliders episodes pretty clearly. There was the one where the woman won the lottery, only to discover that it was actually population control. And then there was the one where the black guy was a famous singer that everyone thought was dead.

I give way more points to Sliders for being an original-ish concept that had to be done. SeaQuest never seemed to rise above being a mediocre Star Trek ripoff.



Probably Happy Days. Jus' sayin'!



Because no one cared after Chuck Fishman left after the 2nd season.

Sadly, back then everyone was bleating "But Sliders is a rip off of Quantum Leap", while Quantum Leap was not always more more than a shallow feel-good emotional massage piece along the same vein of Highway to Heaven or Touched by an Angel (but a fun one nonetheless, thank Sam and Al and the actors elevating a lot of material and made it their own show)... Except the premises for both Sliders and QL had nothing even remotely the same. Except to show that blue special effects are for the good people and red special effects are for those meanies... QL resorted to piggybacking on real life history as a nostalgia fest as well as being a partial cop-out, Sliders actually tried breaking new ground and doing what-if scenarios. That made Sliders more creative.

(Though the population control episode, which was an amazingly strong and tension-filled finale, it goes back to the audience not understanding what even the opening credits told with aplomb because some thought it was an anti-abortion piece when the issue told was population control (yet another delightful WTF moment from 1995), but even those titles got dumbed down every subsequent season - the third being the worst if I remember correctly - of which explained more about the audience not understanding what wasn't a difficult premise at that point...)

 

[Greg Cox]

Never really got into either series, but my impression is that, while SEAQUEST may have had a bigger profile at the time, SLIDERS is probably better remembered these days . . . at least among sci-fi fans.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

A few good episodes had promise... then came the series finale (ugh, not since 'The Prisoner' did a solid TV show get such a bizarre, third-rate ending...)

Yeah, but "bizarre" was basically the name of the game from day one with The Prisoner. Although the last few episodes before the finale were also pretty darn pointless.