Time traveling scientist Sam Beckett may be making a Leap back to television.
NBC has ordered a pilot for a potential sequel series to their popular 1990s time travel drama series Quantum Leap.
The original series starred Scott Bakula as a scientist whose time travel experiment went a little “caca,” leaving him ping-ponging through history, briefly inhabiting other people’s bodies. He is aided by his partner Al (the late Dean Stockwell) who appears to Sam as a hologram from Sam’s future that only he can see. The key for Sam being able to make his next Leap was to try and “putting things right which had once gone wrong,” according to the show’s opening prologue. Hopefully, that next would take Sam back home to his own time, though that never happened.
The show’s logline, according to the Hollywood Reporter, at least suggests that at some point Scott Bakula’s Sam Beckett could make an appearance.
It’s been 30 years since Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished. Now a new team has been assembled to restart the project in the hopes of understanding the mysteries behind the machine and the man who created it.
Original series creator Donald Bellisario will be executive producing alongside original seies writer/producer Deborah Platt and Blindspot producer Martin Gero. Gotham writers Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt are set to co-showrun.
Quantum Leap‘s time travel device is a nifty overlay onto the standard episodic TV show format of the wandering hero, one who comes into a town, meets a set of characters and helps them with some problem before moving on to the next town. Although the show initially resisted having Sam interact with historical events and people, it eventually relented somewhat, allowing him to meet the likes of sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer and the young future horror novelist Stephen King and to find himself embroiled in the JFK assassination in an episode which featured a rather ingenious twist at its end.
The series struggled in the ratings, but did manage to spin-off a comic book series, which ended when its publisher went out of business, and a string of tie-in novels that lasted until 2000.
A revival of the series has been something that has been percolating for some time. In 2010, there was word that Quantum Leap could potentially return as a theatrical movie. Last year at this time, NBC’s head of program planning and strategy Jeff Bader stated the show was one of a number of Universal Studios properties that were under consideration for a revival on their Peacock streaming service.
