Sliders

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.

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....

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.

For the first three years of Sliders, this show was an intelligent, original and fascinating example of perfect scifi TV. The acting was mostly above average, but the character dynamics of this odd group (a whiz kid, his wannabe girlfriend, his college professor and a washed-up singer who got into sliding by accident) and the writing were what really made the show. Unfortunately, the show began to go downhill when the original cast was shaken up with the departure of the formidable John Rhys-Davies as the Professor, and jumped the shark completely when it lost Sabrina Lloyd as Wade. I'm sure many salivating teen males would disagree with me on the pointlessness of Kari Wuhrer, but it's clear to me that she added nothing but cleavage to the show.

A show with great potential that should have continued for years.

SciFi has spent this week running episodes of Sliders from the early seasons, and man, did I forget how good they were.

The early episodes of the show, particularly the pilot, were fantastic-- the alternate worlds were well thought out, and I'd think about the plausibility of them as I lay in bed at night before drifting off to sleep.

Too bad they had to dumb it down and start ripping off movie plots in later seasons. I mourned the loss of John Rhys-Davies, his character was great. And to replace him with boobs-on-patrol Kari Wuhrer was pathetic. It was a completely obvious attempt to boost ratings by grabbing the eyeballs of the geek-horndog set that also lusted after Scully and Seven of Nine and religiously watched their respective shows.

To sum up, don't waste your time watching any episodes from the later seasons.