In the mid-1990s, I was a fan of the FOX television show, Sliders. For the record, I didn't think it was the best show ever made. Some of the plots, in fact, were very derivative of other films and television shows. But the cast (Jerry O'Connell, Sabrina Lloyd, Cleavant Derricks, and especially veteran character actor John Rhys-Davies) were an ensemble that worked well together even as I had initial misgivings about the viability of Derricks' character Rembrandt Brown. They had chemistry. And watching the third season on DVD made the power of that chemistry abundantly clear.
Sliders, for the uninitiated, is a show about a young scientist who accidentally creates a technology that allows the travel between parallel universes (each having its own earth). The problem is that they are lost without their originating coordinates and unable to return to their own version of Earth (Earth Prime).
So even as the plots became extremely derivative (one episode involves tornados which were popular due to the film Twister, another is a blatant rip-off of the film Tremors), the chemistry between the characters Quinn Mallory, Wade Welles, Rembrandt Brown and especially Professor Maximilian Arturo made the show, at its worst, entertaining.
Having started graduate school around the beginning of the third season, I started to lose track of the show. It also didn't help the the FOX network had started to randomly shuffle the program around in its schedule (a sure sign that a network was trying to eliminate a show by making sure its fans had problems finding it (thereby lowering its ratings). It became very surrealistic as one week I witnessed the death of main character Professor Arturo, and another week he appeared back in a new episode (this mystery was solved for me as I watched season three and the opening of the episode, which I had previously missed, set the episode up as a flashback). Then the show was cancelled on FOX and moved to the Sci-Fi network which was unavailable on my cable provider at the time.
The demise of Arturo (brought about by John Rhys-Davies firing due to having insulted new producer David Peckinpah's wife at a party years earlier), and the introduction of Kari Wuhrer's Maggie Beckett character, destroyed that chemistry. Maggie Beckett was an annoying character, Wade Welles becomes petty and annoying, and Quinn Mallory moves from likable nerd to an unlikable character full of angst. Even Rembrandt Brown, the one character who remains ironically the most likable is occasionally tetchy.
I found this destruction of a very likable show, with a very flexible premise, very sad.
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