Sliders
Fox (1995)
A science fiction television series that had potential to become one of the greatest of all time premiered thirty years ago today.
Sliders began its life on March 22nd, 1995 as a mid-season replacement on the Fox network. It was an hour long show that starred Jerry O'Connell as Quinn Mallory, a young genius who accidentally invents a device that allows people to travel into parallel worlds. He, along with his co-worker and love interest Wade Welles (Sabrina Lloyd), his college professor Maximilian Arturo (John Rhys-Davies), and a singer who was in the wrong place at the wrong time named Rembrandt Brown (Cleavant Derricks) travel through the wormhole created by Quinn's device and end up getting lost in the multiverse. Each episode featured the group "sliding" into a different parallel world in an attempt to finally get back home.
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| Starlog Science Fiction Explorer (June 1995) |
The concept of a multiverse is a relatively common plot device after it has been popularized by the Marvel Cinematic Universe and in movies such as Everything Everywhere All At Once which won the Academy Award for Best Picture a few years ago. However, this was rarely used on television or in movies thirty years ago. The concept was explored in an episode of The Twilight Zone and several times on Star Trek, but it wasn't the kind of thing that people generally understood unless you were a sci-fi nerd. I think this lack of familiarity with the idea of parallel worlds was one of the things that kept Sliders from being a big hit when it first aired. A lot of write ups about the show back in the mid 90's compared it to Quantum Leap, which is another excellent show, but the only thing it has in common with Sliders is the fact that the travelers have no control over where they're going or when they leave.
This show will forever be linked in my memory with the days of dial-up internet. I was 14 years old when it premiered. Not long afterward, I got an IBM Aptiva computer from Radio Shack, and a 28.8k modem to go online. One of the first things that I looked up was Sliders, and I came across a message board run by MCA Universal called the Sliders NetForum where I used the username neonrocketship for the first time. I didn't post very often, but I checked the boards after every episode to see what folks were saying about the show.
I spent even more time back in those days working on my first website, which was a Sliders fan page in the Area 51 community of GeoCities. I have long since forgotten what it was called, but I remember having a gadget called the Snappy Video Snapshot hooked up to my computer and my VCR to capture jpgs from the show to upload to the GeoCities page.
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| Computer Life (October 1995) scanned and shared by Vintage Computing & Gaming |
Does anybody else remember this thing? I spent hours of my life as a teenager going through VHS tapes of movies and shows trying to pause it at exactly the right moment to get the perfect image on my computer. Clearly I was one of the cook kids... not nerdy at all... no sir-eee.
The first three seasons of Sliders were broadcast on Fox. If you're going to watch it in 2025, my recommendation is that you stick to these three seasons. Network meddling began to rear its ugly head midway through the third season, which led the show's co-creators Tracy Tormé, Robert K. Weiss, and John Landis to drop out of the series altogether. This left David Peckinpah in charge, who wasted no time in running the series into the ground.
Sliders was cancelled by Fox after the third season. It was picked up by the Sci-Fi Channel for the fourth and fifth seasons. At the time, I was happy to see that the show had been saved and hopeful that it would get back to its roots going forward, but that didn't happen. The fourth and fifth season had a handful interesting ideas for parallel worlds, but the show had become an absolute train wreck. The series finale at the end of the fifth season felt more like a mercy killing than a celebration.
Sliders is available to stream on Peacock and Fandango. The series was also released on DVD, and new old stock of the box sets are still pretty easy to find on eBay for very reasonable prices. I absolutely loved this series when I was a teenager and I strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys science fiction, but I just as strongly recommend sticking to just the first three seasons. You'll see a sharp decline in the show from the start to the end of the third season, but I assure you, the worst episode of the first three seasons is still a lot better than what comes after that.
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| The Philadelphia Inquirer (March 22, 1995) |
