Quantum Leap

Entry updated 4 November 2024. Tagged: TV.

1. US tv series (1989-1993). Universal/MCA for NBC. Created and produced by Donald P Bellisario. Supervising producer Deborah Pratt. Directors include David Hemmings, Aaron Lipstadt, James R Whitmore, Gilbert Shelton, Christopher Welch, Joe Napolitano, Michael Watkins and Michael Zinberg. Writers include Bellisario, Pratt, Beverly Bridges, Paul Brown, Chris Ruppenthal, Scott Shepherd and Tommy Thompson. Cast includes Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell. Five seasons to May 1993; 95 one-hour episodes in all. Colour.

Quantum Leap is an unusual Time-Travel series, with Bakula as Sam Beckett (!), a Scientist lost in time, helped only by the projected hologram of Albert (Stockwell), an eccentric colleague trapped in the future. Unlike the heroes of The Time Tunnel (1966-1967), who were physically dumped into historical situations, Beckett travels mentally, his consciousness inhabiting the bodies of other people (see Identity Transfer) at any time between the 1950s and the 1980s; the time visited has to be after his own birth. As in Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941), the audience sees the hero as himself while those around him see the person he is possessing. Although the premise is gimmicky, the series reached a surprisingly high standard. Highspots from 1989 have Beckett suddenly in the bodies of a test pilot about to step into an experimental plane Beckett cannot possibly fly, a mobster required to sing in Italian at a wedding, an old Black man in the South in the 1950s during a civil-rights demonstration, and a pretty woman being pursued by a lecherous suitor. Only notionally sf, this is a shade grittier, funnier and cleverer than it has any right to be, and benefits strongly from the two relaxed, witty central performances. [KN]

2. US tv series (2022-2024). Production companies include Dean Georgaris Entertainment 2.0 and Universal Television for NBC. Created and produced by Donald P Bellisario. Executive producer Steven Lilien. Directors include Chris Grismar, Pamela Romanowsky, Avi Youabian. Writers include Deric A Highes, Emily Kim, Romy Loor and Margarita Matthews. Cast includes Caitlin Bassett, Ernie Hudson, Raymond Lee and Mason Alexander Park. Two seasons; 31 one-hour episodes. Colour.

This sequel to the original Time Travel/Identity Transfer series follows up the Quantum Leap project thirty years later. As the project is poised to restart, Dr Ben Song (Lee), without authorization or explanation, leaps into the past to the puzzlement of the other employees, who have to track him down, find out why he has done this, and help him survive in the past. Like Sam Beckett before him, he takes over seemingly random people in the past and is able to leave an individual only after resolving a problem. He is aided by the hologram of his fiancée, Addison Augustine (Bassett), who with the help of the project's crew, including project leader Herbert "Magic" Williams (Hudson) and head programmer Ian Wright (Park), tries to determine where and when he is and help him get through it. As was not the case in the first series, he is Amnesiac and does not know why he made the current leap; an ongoing plot thread involves his gradually recovering his Memory and motivations. Complications develop as he encounters another time traveller like himself. In some episodes he finds himself outside the parameters of people and situations during his lifetime: in one he leaps into a Mexican-American gunslinger in 1879; in another, into a servant girl accused of witchcraft in 1692. The series was not renewed after the second-season finale in which Addison is somehow transported into the past with him. [LW]

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