Sliders Is A Lost Classic And It Deserves A Reboot
Sliders had a lot of wasted potential that needs to be finally realized in a reboot.
When it comes to genre television, it seems like everything old is new again. Star Trek: Picard just had a successful third and final season, and Babylon 5 is finally getting a much-anticipated reboot. With all this love for old franchises in the air and the current Hollywood push for revisiting old intellectual property, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: the classic television show Sliders, in which characters kept shifting from one alternate reality to another, deserves its own reboot.
The cast changed quite a bit over the course of five seasons, but the core cast and original premise of Sliders were golden. Indiana Jones star John Rhys-Davies played a professor and mentor to an ambitious science whiz played by Jerry O’Connell. This science whiz invents a method of “sliding” from his world to a parallel reality, but when something goes wrong with the technology, these two and two others are stuck sliding from world to world blindly, each time hoping to return to their original world.
Part of what made the premise so great, and what makes Sliders so ripe for a reboot, is that it helped to channel the vibe of William Shatner’s Star Trek: The Original Series. Once the characters land in a new world, they never know how long it will be until the portal will open again. This means they are stuck dealing with whatever local drama they encounter, much like Kirk and crew had to do whenever they beamed down to one of those strange new worlds.
Speaking of which, the recent success of Strange New Worlds helps prove why we need a Sliders reboot. Fans who were turned off by the season-long mystery arcs of shows like Star Trek: Discovery enjoy Strange New Worlds because each episode is a fun, self-contained adventure. Sliders always specialized in delivering those kinds of self-contained stories, and it seems like audiences are ready for a return to this kind of episodic storytelling.
Another reason we think modern audiences would love a Sliders reboot is because that show was ahead of its time when it came to the exploration of parallel universes. Long before Marvel went all in on the multiverse with movies like Quantumania, Sliders was exploring all of the narrative potential that comes with turning every episode into a “what if?” premise (such as “what if America lost the Revolutionary War” and “what if young people ruled the world”).
Now that, frankly, Marvel is wasting the narrative possibilities of the multiverse with awful movies like Quantumania, a Sliders reboot could show audiences how awesome such stories can be.
While it may sound a tad paradoxical, we’d also like to see a Sliders reboot so the final two seasons of this show don’t remain its legacy. John Rhys-Davies departed the show in the third season, and this was just the first of major cast adjustments. After the show was canceled on Fox, it was picked up by SyFy, but by the time it was over, only Rembrandt’s actor (Cleavant Derricks) remained from the original quartet, and the show had changed its method of storytelling, moving to darker action rather than thought-provoking sci-fi.
At the end of the day, I live by a simple philosophy that many movie and TV nerds swear by: if we are destined to endlessly reboot various franchises, we should focus less on rebooting great ones and more on rebooting ones that had unrealized potential. The first two Sliders seasons are peak sci-fi, but the third season began to kick off a decline that eventually led to a downright embarrassing fifth and final season.
A reboot would allow showrunners to capitalize on everything that made those early seasons great while avoiding the pratfalls of later seasons, and let’s face it: don’t sci-fi fans deserve something new to watch other than endless Star Trek and Star Wars spinoffs?
