Credit – Universal television
‘Sliders’ might get a reboot and I for one couldn’t be more excited. The original series, which aired from 1995 to 2000 and starred Jerry O’Connell, Cleavant Derricks, Sabrina Lloyd, and John Rhys-Davies, looks like it might get a reboot if co-creator Tracy Torme has anything to do about it. In an interview with Masters of the Genre via ‘Bleeding Fool’, Torme revealed that he was in talks with members of the original cast on returning to a reboot.
“I can’t say that the original cast is all coming back because we haven’t made those deals yet. But I talk to Cleavant Derricks all the time. And I imagine it wouldn’t be a ‘Sliders’ without Jerry O’Connell. And I talk to Rhys-Davies. So eventually, I believe, it’s going to be a mixture of the old original cast and a couple new characters.”
Reboots for ‘Sliders’ has been nothing more than rumors until recently. Torme confirmed this by stating that his team were in the middle of rebooting the show right now.
“We’re right in the middle of rebooting it right now as we speak. If you had talked to me about this six months ago, I would have said, ‘Oh yeah’, that’s a rumor because there have been a lot of rumors over the years, but they were never real,” he explained. “But this one is real; we’re actually working on it.”
Torme Understands That Writing Good Stories in the Current Political Climate can be Limiting
Torme also discussed the hurdles of today’s hypersensitivity around politics and how writing a show in that environment can be very limiting.
“I thought I had a tough time twenty years ago or whenever it was…getting certain stories off the ground in ‘Sliders’. And it’s much worse now.”
Torme continued in the interview by stating how much more of a struggle it is now than it was then.
“I can tell you that it’s going to be even more of a struggle even than it was then. Already I’ve thrown a couple of ideas out and everyone in the room was kind of horrified going, ‘Oh! You can’t do that!'” “So I can already tell you that people are so hyper sensitive to so many issues now that it’s going to be more of a challenge trying not to turn it into some politically correct ‘safe’ show. If it becomes that, what’s the point of doing it?”
Torme did promise, however, that the show would not be woke.
“No! I promise you it will never be woke. Never.”
That remains to be seen as we have seen executives capitulate in the past about staying true to the story only to go back on that promise later. Kevin Feige anyone? In my opinion, If I were Tracy Torme, I would fire anybody that was too sensitive and get people on board that had his same vision of what a great ‘Sliders’ reboot might look like.
