User Reviews

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.

Jerry O'Connell played Quinn Mallory, a young college student who invents an inter-dimensional wormhole that takes him, his friend Wade,(Sabrina Lloyd) Professor Arturo(John Rhys Davies), and innocent bystander and singer Rembrandt Brown(Cleavant Derricks) on a seemingly unending journey. Their adventures traveling into different Earths were entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking, and continued this way until Arturo left the series in dramatic fashion...Then he was replaced by actress Kari Wurher, who played Maggie, and that was where the third season started going wrong, with too many episodes being rip- offs of genre films; rather than imagination, action became the norm.

Fourth season saw the departure of Wade in a cold-hearted plot thread that was never resolved properly. Jerry's brother Charlie joined the cast as his brother Colin, and I found his innocent character a breath of fresh air, and some really good episodes lie ahead, though over-reliance on invaders called Kromaggs became a problem.

Fifth and last season saw the departure of both O'Connell brothers, whose fates as written and presented were the stupidest thing possible; so bad was this season that some just ignore it as featuring an eerily similar group of sliders...such a thing wasn't without precedence! Whole series is on DVD; bring back the original cast, and "kick start" some new adventures!

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.

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.

A perfect example of a show being written into the ground, with the entire original cast being replaced by the end of the series.

The pilot is still one of my favorites for any sci-fi series. I keep re-watching it to this day. I wish it was made into a feature instead, with the rest being left to imagination.

The spirit of exploration established initially, was gone the moment they introduced a persistent villain. The formula changed and over time got diluted to the point where none of the taste remained that made me fall in love with the show.

I recommend watching no more than 3 seasons and just ending it there. That way you'll remember the best of it.

I have to put my two bits of opinion although a lot of what I was going to say has already been said. I was hooked from the first show and I began to lose interest in the middle of third when John Rhys-Davies left. I like almost everything he is in but in a lot of his shows, I think the suits did not like him. He was the glue that held the show together and after he disappeared, other members of the cast did not mix well with the replacement (s). One by one members began to leave the show and I did not care for the angle of the Kromaggs.

As has already been said, there was too much instability in the cast and it looks like there was too much interference from the suits and too much backstabbing within the cast after the replacements began to appear. I see a number of them are no longer in the acting business. I think I gave up after season 3. I am surprised it lasted six seasons. They could have done better if they had gotten more sci-fy writers who understood the show and I think they are out there even today. There have been a lot of series that used short stories written by writers of the genre.

Since it went away around 2000, I think it would succeed today if there were the right people to run it. Said people should also know enough of when to keep their fingers out of areas that they don't know about. Think about it.

Sliders was a great, fun show and it had the best fans in the entire world. And what a cast! Sabrina Lloyd, Kari Wuhrer, Jerry O'Connell, John Rhys-Davies, that other guy, what an amazing bunch of people and I'm so happy I got to meet them all in person. I sure wish they would have brought it back for just one more season or even just did a Sliders movie to wrap up the story lines. Did Rembrandt Brown live? Did Rembrandt Brown die? Did the Kromaggs get what was coming to them? Did Earth Prime ever get free of their clutches? I think it's sad that it ended in a cliffhanger but hopefully someday the show will come back in some form and answer those lingering questions. Until then, just make sure you "Cry Like a Man", ha ha!

I really loved this series for the first few years, but when Arturo left, it started the slide to mediocrity. It accelerated when Wade and Quinn left, to the point it was rambling nonsense. Don't know the reasoning for the actors leaving, but it did ruin it. Perhaps it lost some direction as there was little purpose to each episode other than surviving long enough to slide to the next world. Unlike Quantum Leap, which had a similar premise, but it's purpose was to fix things in each episode.

This show was great. After John Rhys Davies left the show (complaining that the scripts were starting to get too stupid, which they were) it was still pretty OK. When Wade and O'Connell left the show became total garbage. Nothing on Crying Man, he was always very good, but the stories became much too lazy and stupid (very bad writing) and Quinn's brother was awful.

This was, at one point, the most exciting thing on television. I do not recall ever looking forward to a new episode of anything as much as I did Sliders in the late 90's. From the pilot episode, I was absolutely hooked. The initial characters are a perfect team, the story-line intriguing and the writing well done.

Sadly, this all nose dives part way through the second season when the chemistry is thrown off with poor replacement actors (apparently the show needed sex appeal) and an endlessly grating quest against the "Kromaggs", a race of inter-dimensional Nazi's from an alternate Earth. In the first one or two seasons you never knew what you'd get, or what kind of world the adventurers would slide to. By season three, things become very predictable. Yet another boring Kromagg episode featuring a woman running around with a big gun. I never made it to season five, but for the first season and a half this show still deserves a solid 9/10.

The first 2 series of Sliders are, in my opinion, much the best. As I moved into the later episodes I began to enjoy them less. Of the original 4 "sliders" by the time you reach these later episodes only Cleavant Derrick remains. It is only my personal opinion of course but I found these later episodes to have plots which on occasions were either poor or difficult to follow. Although it has been mentioned before I must also agree that I felt the series finished on an unresolved note. With hindsight I think I would have watched the series from th beginning up until the original "sliders" left, not bothering with the last couple of series. My vote of 5 hopefully reflects my view, ie 10 for the first part of the series followed by 0 for the latter.

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.

Of all Sci-Fi shows on TV, I've found only two proving to be fresh, most engaging, and innovative...the first one is Quantum Leap that I reviewed just before, and the second one being Sliders.

Sliders has made a refreshing concept of 'alternative-reality' world - it did not join the already-crowded time-travel ship, instead it decided to set sail with its own, dubbed "dimensional travel". The creators must think that inter-dimensional travel should not be less engaging than time travel - "Same time, same earth, different dimension", as it is spoken in the opening credit.

They were right. I was among the ones who found it to be very engaging, brilliant and could not miss any single episode.

The premise is clearly explained in the Pilot, which, in my opinion - ironically, turns out to be the best episode throughout the whole series. A group of four with different motives - Quinn Mallory, Wade Welles, Rembrandt Brown, and Maximilian Arturo - slide into a vortex which enables them to do inter-dimensional travel. The point is, they could not control into which dimension they will land next and they often end up being stranded in unexpected situations in earths they have no idea at all - a world where Russia rules America, another one where men are inferior to women, or one world where USA is still a British colony - the quartet slide from one dimension to another as I eagerly watched...

Until the time came when they met their demise one by one; starting from Arturo who was shot, then Wade who was abducted by their archnemesis The Kromaggs, then Quinn followed when he was lost in the vortex - leaving Rembrandt alone. Well, actually he was not alone, there were others eventually came join him. Actually, the disappearance of a show's original protagonists is not something taboo - many shows actually do that without much sacrificing the quality of the show itself. What made this worse was, their demise is evoked by some dark motives behind the screen. Word has it that the actors who played the eventually-lost characters; O'Connell, Lloyd, and Rhys-Davies, were actually fired from the show or withdrew because of..well, say, conflicts of interest. Things only got even worse, when Tracy Torme, the show's mastermind, also withdrew and left the show's fate into a bunch of workers who -sadly- lacked ideas how to maintain an already-brilliant show.

For the aforementioned reasons, my interest had decreased dramatically. The last season in which I watched every episode was Season 3, only a few of Season 4 that I watched, and I did not watch any of Season 5 (when all original casts but Rembrandt Brown had lost) at all.

Rembrandt, while he was one of the starting lineups and stayed until the very end, was not enough. I don't by all means want to say that the replacement actors (Kari Wuhrer, Tembi Locke, Charlie O'Connell, and Robert Floyd) were bad - they've tried after all. Some episodes from the last two seasons actually had quite intriguing and potential plots, say "World Killer", "Genesis", and "Requiem" . But I think it's fair to say, that Sliders show has lost its spirit without Quinn Mallory, Wade Welles, and Maximilian Arturo.

The worst of all is, of course, the very last episode, "The Seer". The episode itself is not that bad, but it provides a very terrible conclusion for the show. I realize, it was initially intended to be continued with the next season. But - again, thanks to those conflicts of interest - it didn't. And so, the real victim is the viewers like me who was left clueless, like it all has totally gone into the thin air.

Many viewers had drawn inevitable comparisons between The Sliders and Quantum Leap. The most glaring one is that Maggie Beckett, one of the replacement slider is a nephew of Quantum Leap's Sam Beckett (very interesting indeed, though never officially confirmed that I know of). Both provide refreshing approaches to Sci-Fi show world and deal with uncontrollable travel and "the endless hope of getting home" though none has managed to get home until the end. But Sliders' fate is much worse than that of Quantum Leap. In Quantum Leap, Sam and Al still stayed until the very end. While I also hate Quantum Leap's cliffhanger ending, it was not contaminated by the so-called conflicts of interest, and at least it did not lost its spirit throughout the show. Needless to say, all episodes in Quantum Leap's last season are as good as those in the first season.

To sum it up, although it has been more than 10 years since The Sliders were gone, I still wish that I might see them again in the future. But let's clear it out, to me, NEVER change the starting lineups. There is some hope, for it's the good of inter-dimensional travel show - while one character dies, the same character in another dimension may be still alive.

Bring Quinn Mallory, Rembrandt Brown, Wade Welles, and Maximilian Arturo back to the show - I want nobody else - and get rid of those stupid conflicts of interest. I have been waiting for too long.

The first episode of this series absolutely captivated me. I was fascinated by the whole concept of parallel dimensions and how the differences could be as minimal as "green is stop, red is go" or as massive as having dinosaurs still roaming California. I was very disappointed that it got canceled after just a few episodes, and delighted when it got picked up elsewhere. The twist at the end of the first season was absolutely wicked.

But the fact is, somewhere along the line, they decided they needed more than just a new dimension or two every week. They invented an ongoing enemy which had to be fought in every episode; brought in a previously unheard-of brother for Quinn (played VERY stiffly by Charlie O'Connell, the real-life brother of Jerry O'Connell who plays Quinn); eliminated original characters and brought in new ones. The show that had so entranced me at first no longer held my interest for even part of an episode.

I wish they had ended the series rather than getting into the war with the Kromaggs.

I was interested in watching this show again after reflecting on the fond memories I had of it as a kid. It was a great premise, and I remember that the show got darker and darker as it went along. On these two counts my memories were correct.

'Sliders' is a good show. The problem is that it could have easily been a great show. Instead, it got bogged down in bad writing, in lousy rip-off plots of movies that were popular at the time, and all too often it recycled plots.

That said, when Sliders was good, it was usually VERY good. The story arcs involving the Kromaggs, the eventual 'glitching' of the sliding device, and the loss of certain characters all added to the tension and the suspense of the show. Some people thought the show got worse as it went along, and in some ways this is understandable. Characters with whom the audience has grown attached get written off, often in very cruel ways. Yet, I felt this added to the story, overall. As painful as it was to see some of the twists and changes in the series, these changes reinforced the idea that 'Sliding' was a dangerous matter, and reminded us that the threats that Sliding made possible were to be taken seriously, rather than something that could only effect redshirts.

If the writers of Stargate SG-1 had written this series, then it would probably be one of the best shows ever made. But they didn't. And the writing is the real problem, here. Too often the same expendable, predictable characters in these world show up and explain the whole good/bad of the parallel world within a few minutes after our Sliders arrive. And too often, the worlds are little more than hyperboles of ridiculous social commentary which is heavy handed at best. Where the show does well is with the science-fiction angle, which, unfortunately, the people at FOX apparently asked the writers to tone down. The result was a very watered down, often schizophrenic show which, though addictive, often fails at living up to it's own potential.

Nonetheless, it's a good watch for a rainy day, or to stave off boredom. There's enough thought-provoking material to keep you watching, even past the horrible episodes about 'tornado worlds' and 'wild west world'. The way to enjoy the show is to accept the same exposure to randomness and chance that our main characters are asked to. It's hit and miss.

I have never in my life watched a similar show.

It was amazing and original for the first two seasons, every episode was different and unique and the cast and the stories were great.

Then season 3 came and it was ok until they decided to get rid of the best actor and every good thing this show had.

The new showrunner destroyed everything, the cast, the stories, the quality. The show became a joke, something so bad that it was difficult to watch.

Watching season four was a burden, watching season five was a medieval torture.

Seasons one and two have a rating of 7-9 Season three is ok until the best actors walked away.

Seasons 4 and 5 .... the worst tv show I have seen in all my life.

EVER. My God what a torture was to finish this atrocity.