Sliders was a science fiction show created by Tracy Torme. It starred Jerry O'Connell as Quinn Mallory, an inventor who built a device that enabled him to travel into parallel worlds. Unfortunately, the device lost the coordinates to his original reality and so he and his comrades (originally including Sabrina Lloyd, Cleavant Derricks and John Rhys-Davies) are perpetually 'sliding' from one reality to another, hoping each time they might find the way back home.
The series aired on Fox for 3 years (1995-1997), took a year off, then returned on the Sci-Fi Channel for 2 more years (1998-2000). When the series was first announced I was interested in it but I had no idea exactly when the show started airing or what time it was on in my area. I think it was originally on Fridays; whenever it was, I wasn't usually around when it aired. The first time I caught an episode on its original airdate was when I saw the season finale; I had no idea if the show would be back for a 2nd season but I wanted to see it. I was surprised to learn in retrospect that the 1st season had only 10 episodes. What a brief window!
Season 2 is where I really started watching the show and there's a lot of fun ideas in that season. The show didn't take itself too seriously with wacky concepts like a world where people believe in witchcraft, or where California was part of Texas. Easily the episode I most enjoyed at the time was "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome," where the cast encountered an alternate version of Rhys-Davies' character and weren't certain which version slid with them at the episode's end. In retrospect, this 13-episode season was the highlight of the series.
I saw almost every episode of the 3rd season when they first aired. At the time, I noticed there were a lot of episodes that seemed like rip-offs of popular films. To this day I've never seen the movie Species but I assumed the episode "the Breeder" was a Species rip-off. Apparently, that was deliberate as Tracy Torme got booted off his own show this season. The showrunners also drove off Rhys-Davies and replaced him with Kari Wuhrer. In what became a tradition for the show, whenever a cast member quit Sliders the writers gave their character a humiliating, definitive, cruel death scene. This wound up being Sabrina Lloyd's last season too. Lloyd went on to better things with Sports Night while Rhys-Davies went on to, um, You Wish, but more importantly had no other commitments when Lord of the Rings started filming.
It was watching this season again that really cemeted for me how little the creators cared for their own program. Take the episode "Paradise Lost," where they slide into a small town (rather than either of their usual haunts, the cities of San Francisco or Los Angeles) where the citizens feed people to a Tremors-style monster to prolong their lives. When your show's high concept is that you can send your characters into a parallel world, how do you end up with an episode like this? There's nothing about the script that suggests Sliders; if you told me it was taken from the X-Files or Outer Limits' slush pile, I'd believe you.
The Sci-Fi Channel years saw the show become kind of a vanity project for Jerry O'Connell as he brought in his brother Charlie pretty much just because he had the clout to make them hire his brother. When the O'Connells both quit the show, the series attempted carry on without them, but kept the character of Mallory by casting a new actor (Robert Floyd) as Mallory's alternate self.
Watching that final season of Sliders, it's especially grim to see how far the budget must have fallen. Instead of filming on the Universal backlot, they were shooting on low-budget sets that looked to be made of cardboard and about 5' square. It's amazing that the show carried on so far, but I guess circa 2000 there was a lot of science fiction on cable networks and in syndication (Stargate: SG1, Andromeda, Earth: Final Conflict, First Wave) and I guess every studio and network wanted skin in the game.
I think there are some fun gems in the first 2 seasons of Sliders but boy, overall this show does not hold up.
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