Sliders, les mondes parallèles

When Slider's debuted I was in heaven, OK the F/X weren't Hollywood grand but they did what they could with what they had, the cast was great and the story was engaging. Season 1 was wonderful, season 2 (actually season 2 was the second half of season 1) was almost as good. The season 3 came and brought the deadly David Peckinpah, who's Indian name is probably "He-who-has-no-talent" . Mr. P promptly decided that the show was too cerebral (i.e. his low I.Q. couldn't figure it out) and got rid of the creator, the good writers, and the finest actor on the show. He replaced the actor with a bimbo nicknamed Captain D-cups and got a movie rental card to replace the writers (go ahead, count how many plots in seasons 3-5 are direct rip off of a popular movie). And thus a great show died, only to have it's corpse hung on strings and forced to dance for Peckinpah as he moved it to the Sci-Fi channel where he had even more control and less creativity. Alas poor Sliders....

This was one of my favorite shows when I was in high school and college. I was really into sci-fi at the time (especially "The X-Files"), and I had a huge crush on Jerry O'Connell, so this series was right up my alley. The original premise was intriguing: a professor and his student discover a way to create wormholes into parallel universes, to which they would briefly visit before returning to their own earth. Unfortunately the device that allows them to do this gets damaged and they are stuck in a parallel world with no idea how to get home. So they keep "sliding" from one random world to the next, hoping to eventually return to "Earth Prime". Do they return? I have no idea, because after the first few seasons the show took a sharp turn for the worse and became almost unrecognizable. While most shows jump the shark at some point, this show jumped about 10 sharks early on. It's a shame because it was one of the few intelligent shows going at the time. If you are new to the series, I would rent the first two seasons, and maybe the third. Once John Rhys-Davies leaves (whose character was one of the backbones of the show), it's not worth watching anymore. My rating is for the first few seasons, not the anomaly it became after that. I guess one could say the show itself slid into a horrifying "parallel universe", never to return again.

An amazing Sci-Fi show that should have had the success it deserved instead of being buried by lame writing and casting.

Sliders focused on a group of 4 people who discovered a way to 'slide' between parallel worlds. Unfortionatley, they got lost in the inter-dimension, and were consigned to wandering between the many parallel universes in the hope of someday finding their way home.

When Tracy Torme' and Robert K. Weiss created this show in 1995, they had truly made something special. Unfortionately FOX decided to completely ruin it.

They began by airing the episodes out of sequence in the first 2 seasons, meaning that there could be no continuity between episodes, so whenever an extra character slid with the Sliders they were never seen again (with one poor exception). In the 3rd season David "Peckerhead" Peckinpah (a man with less talent than a dog turd) became an Executive Producer and many episodes became movie rip-offs instead of 'what if' concepts where parallel worlds had alternate histories to our own. The amazing John Rhys-Davies was then fired mid season 3 and replaced with Kari Wuhrer, a terrible actress who played a terrible character.

FOX allowed the Sci-Fi channel to take over the show for its 4th and 5th seasons. They put David Peckinpah completely in charge of the show, and he buried it by having ape-men called Kromaggs take over the Sliders' home world and by rewriting the backstory of the lead character completely. The premise was changed from finding home to fighting ape-men. In the last season, only one of the original Sliders remained.

When the show finished, it was without any resolution to many of its story arcs or the final episode's cliffhanger.

I feel Tracy Torme's pain. No one could have imagined that they would create a show as brilliant as Sliders, only to see it totally destroyed before their eyes.

Sliders had so much potential, but it was ruined by talentless hacks like 'Peckerhead'.

The first two seasons and the first part of season 3 are really all that are worth watching unfortunately.

I think most people familiar with the show would say that it started off as a really original and interesting show. The 'what if" concept really worked for it. But as time went on, the show became something worse than repetitive. It abandoned the original premise of the show. They stopped being mainly concerned with getting home and started being more concerned with these Kromag things. That's about where the original cast started to fall away one by one. They still show re-runs on the sci-fi channel, and I catch the early ones when I can. That's when the show was enjoyable. In the last half of the shows six seasons, it was unwatchable.

Sliders had the intriguing premise of a group of people being able to open up a vortex & journeying to parallel earths in alternate dimensions.The fact that a college kid in the present was able to create such a device in his basement to make this happen never seemed realistic to me.We are talking about technology such as this as being thousands of years in our future.But aside from that it was a nifty premise,& not one overdone on TV.The cast was wonderful & enjoyed a terrific chemistry.The story lines were endless,since each earth was different from their homeworld.Sliding into a new & unknown world was exciting,we walked with our sliders as they tried to discover what kind of earth they had come to,what were the differences,the dangers,& how best could they survive until the vortex would open again & propel them to their next earth? The scripts could range from satire to horror to science fiction.The early seasons with the original cast intact were always the best.Sadly, as the seasons went on the scripts declined in quality.John Rhys-Davies was the first to quit due to the poor writing of the show & not being allowed mush input.The creators of the series unfortunately had problems with network "suits" as to the direction of the show.That is a problem that happens all too often with TV sf series. By the end of the show's run,only the engaging Cleavant Derricks was left from the original cast.Able actors replaced the originals but were never could recapture the magic of their relationships.It was a disappointing end to what began as a fascinating show.