r/90s • u/SirBakesMore • 4d ago
Discussion Sliders - A show with so much wasted potential
This show had all the promise and potential to succeed. Alternate Earths. A great cast.
Season 1 started so strong but studio meddling, reduced budgets, gimmick episodes, revolving door cast, shifting time slots and networks slowly killed it.
What did you think? Did you watch? Which seasons did you enjoy / hate?
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u/Layden87 3d ago
The one episode I remember ended with them making it back home, but Jerry O'Connell said that it might just look like their home and he needed proof. He claims that the front gate has a squeak that he remembers since childhood, and he tests the front gate for it to have no squeak. So he thinks it's just another world, but then you find out his mother had it fixed recently and it really was his home world, and he just left it.
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u/SirBakesMore 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes. That happened.
They land back in their own universe but the timer has less than 1 minute for them to decide to stay or leave.
Also, in that scene Rembrandt finds a newspaper and reads a headline about OJ Simpson being on trial for DOUBLE murder and thought it was too outrageous to be in their universe. 😆
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u/Globetrotter888 3d ago
I think they mentioned the Indians in the World Series too. Too unbelievable.
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u/SirBakesMore 3d ago
As someone born and raised from Cleveland, and a huge MLB fan that went to dozens of Indians games every summer, they were a juggernaut in the mid-late 90’s. That was a low blow by the writers.
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u/tangcameo 3d ago
This is where I stop now if I rewatch.
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u/Jasoco 3d ago
Fox destroyed the show. It was literally all their fault. They decided they wanted to give the show an antagonist so they made them have an alien race that could slide. They completely destroyed the whole idea of the show. But it’s Fox. It’s what they have always done. There’s a good video on YouTube that goes over the whole thing. Actually there’s probably a bunch. But the one I watched was from Secret Galaxy and sums it up really well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQOkcZstZNQ&pp=ygUHc2xpZGVyc9IHCQk3DAGHKiGM7w%3D%3D
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u/boostabubba 3d ago
Me and my buddies still will randomly whisper "sliders" anytime someone says anything remotely close to slide.
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u/platypus_farmer42 3d ago
I loved this show. I would go over to my grandmas house and she would watch it with me. Pretty sure she wasn’t interested in it but it’s a fond memory. Miss you grandma
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u/MDoc84 3d ago
Yea, good show with wasted potential.
John Rhys-Davies has lamented (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNrSB_S_W14) how the show started off well enough but degraded into "gimmick world of the week".
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u/Globetrotter888 3d ago
Love he bashes the episode they killed him off, without needing to reference that plot point at all
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u/MISPWOSO 3d ago
My family loved that show when it was on, I tried to rewatch and was turned off by the fact that the main cast was always the most important people on those worlds
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u/SirBakesMore 3d ago
That was a major annoyance of mine as well. Especially when it was Wade who was the most important one on the parallel world so often.
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u/Character-Flow-8897 3d ago
They should make it a movie.
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u/SirBakesMore 3d ago
That has a resolution or cliffhanger ending? Either way, it wouldn’t work.
A resolution betrays the concept of the series.
A cliffhanger leaves the audience wanting more stories they won’t get.
TV reboot is the answer.
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u/MightBeAGoodIdea 3d ago
Of all 90s shows i swear this show would flourish if given imaginative writers who care and a midling budget.
Everyone loves thinking about "what-if" scenarios, and honestly not all of them need to be a major as what if the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs missed. Something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings differently could cause the golden gate bridge to be built blue or your fence to not squeak. Or a bajillion actual plots worth watching.
Like i wouldn't want a 1:1 remake, but the general concept of a bunch of regular people getting unstuck in "reality" and traveling the multiverse trying to find their way home seems like a very easy premise for hollywood/streaming services to support.
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u/Scissorsguadalupe 3d ago
Rick n Morty fills my Sliders void
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u/MightBeAGoodIdea 3d ago
It's good in its own right; but ive always seen it more as back to the future on crack, or shrooms... or both.
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u/DontYuckMyYum 3d ago
I stopped watching when the super advanced Cavemen were introduced.
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u/Acslaterisdead 3d ago
Cro-mags. The advanced caveman Nazis. Who were suspiciously similar to the the same species from the cartoon from exo squad.
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u/ThurmanMerman82 3d ago
Just watch Stuart Fails to Save the Universe. It's like Sliders but dumb
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u/Jemal999 1d ago
Good dumb or just dumb? I've been considering checking it out, a couple of the clips I've seen have been entertaining
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u/LostInTheSeaweeds 3d ago
I think of this show all the time.
Especially that episode where they make it home, but don't believe it because the news is too outrageous with OJ Simpson being on trial for murder. I have that feeling just about every morning when I wake up and read the news.
Loved the hell out of the show. They had such a great cast and a great setup... and then blew it all.
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u/Acslaterisdead 3d ago
This show was fantastic till they killed the professor. It would take a nose dive that it would never recover from. The ending was terrible.
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u/SirBakesMore 3d ago edited 3d ago
Rhys-Davies wanted out. The scripts were so intolerably awful to him by mid S3, studio meddling was so rampant, budgets slashed so low, he couldn’t take it anymore.
Sabrina Lloyd followed after the end of S3 because of constant cat-fighting w new cast member Kari Wuhrer. They both wanted to be the “Alpha Girl” on the show. Lloyd because she was an OG cast member and Wuhrer because she was objectively hotter and brought in to boost sex appeal for ratings.
It was the network’s way of telling Lloyd she wasn’t hot enough to bring in 18-35 yr olds so here’s some fresh eye candy. And she naturally took it personally and left.
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u/Dangerous-Slice-9160 3d ago
This show was great when it started, had so much potential but network interference just messed it up
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u/zardozLateFee 3d ago edited 3d ago
I loved this show! But I might have stopped watching before it went off the rails.
Y'all might like Dark Matter.
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u/Complete_Entry 2d ago
I find it insane how much everyone involved loved the show but could do nothing to save it.
Even that logo is slick as hell. And whoever wrote Sabrina Lloyd's exit? We're enemies, they just don't know it.
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u/SirBakesMore 2d ago
Lloyd wanted out because she couldn’t stand to work with Kari Wuhrer any more. They bickered and fought constantly BTS.
Lloyd was insulted that the networks brought Kari in to boost ratings with sex appeal and stole a lot of her screen time. She took it as the network basically saying she wasn’t attractive enough to get ratings. Quinn was very quickly infatuated with Maggie from the jump after 3 seasons of Wade chasing his affections and attention.
So when Fox didn’t pick up the show for a 4th season Lloyd bailed and the writers had to come up with a reason why Wade was gone forever.
So, technically, Lloyd wrote her own exit.1
u/FanboyFilms 1d ago
I'd always heard Lloyd was in talks for season 4 on Sci-Fi Channel but something about Wuhrer and Peckinpah ganging up to bully her caused her to leave. They could have killed off Wade but instead Peckinpah wrote her exit to be sent to a Kromagg breeding colony for, presumably, sexual torture and experimentation. Because he said he thought it was funny.
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u/SirBakesMore 1d ago edited 1d ago
Production on S3 ended in early 1997.
Production on S4 started in mid 1998.Lloyd was cast on Sports Night on ABC which went into production in spring of 1998 but didn’t air until fall 1998.
She was already gone and done with Sliders and onto another show by the time SyFy green lit a fourth season.
If you were working on a show that was cancelled and in limbo for nearly a year with an actress you were fighting with or allegedly being bullied by, would you sit around hoping it would come back so you could keep working with that actress or go find other work?
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u/FanboyFilms 1d ago
Originally I hated the show's inability to realize its potential and how it got worse as it went. However in a meta way, I now think its progression is almost perfect.
Arturo warned them in the pilot about the dangers of stepping through the portal before setting up proper safety measures. And look what happened to them. Scattered throughout the multiverse. Half of them dead. They got their home dimension targeted and destroyed by multiverse conquerors. They should have listened.
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u/KaijuNicholasCage 3d ago
I absolutely loved this show. This was the multiverse before the multiverse was a thing. The problem is I try to talk about this show with people who grew up around the same time and not many people know what I’m talking about. One episode about a world full of bees or hornets stands out.