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What's the Latest on a Sliders Revival? Could it Return? Everything we Know
Could a new portal might be opening on a Sliders reboot.
During the last half of the ‘90s, sci-fi fans went on a rip-roaring adventure through the multiverse on Sliders. Co-created by Tracy Tormé and Robert K. Weiss, the show followed college student, inventor, and heartthrob Quinn Mallory (Jerry O’Connell) as he and his Sliding colleagues jumped from one random reality to the next, hoping to get home.
The show featured a rotating cast of multiverse explorers beginning with the aforementioned inventor of Sliding Quinn Mallory, his friend and confidant Wade Welles (Sabrina Lloyd), Quinn’s graduate professor Dr. Arturo (John Rhys-Davies), and the unintentional cosmic stowaway and crooner Rembrandt “Crying Man” Brown. Sliders ended on a cliffhanger; the fates of our favorite wormhole jumpers unknown.
From Reddit posts to petitions on Change.org, fans of the classic SYFY series are still clamoring for more, more than two decades after the Sliders made their last jump. Over the last couple of decades, since the show went off the air, the status of a potential reboot, return, or revival have been nearly as variable as the worlds the Sliders visited. The fate of the show, like the fate of its characters, remains up in the air but here’s what we know so far.
Are We Ever Getting a Return, Reboot, or Revival of Sliders?
O’Connell has kept plenty busy since he left Sliders after season four. In 2015, he spoke about the show and a possible revival during an interview with Slide Cage. “Tracy Tormé is the guy to talk to. I am in if he is. That is the creator and the boss. I go where he tells me,” O’Connell said. A year later, things seemed to be in motion when O’Connell told Yahoo Entertainment, “Tracy Tormé recently called me and said, ‘We’re thinking about rebooting Sliders,’ and I was like, ‘I’m in, buddy, make it happen.’ So, who knows what will happen.”
For More on Sliders:
The Ending of SYFY’s Sliders, Explained
Why Did Most of the Original Sliders Cast Leave the Series?
Why Rembrandt Brown was the Real Main Character of Sliders
That’s been more or less the status of a potential reboot for about a decade, it’s constantly in the works but details and progress are sparse. If and when Sliders does return to our TV screens, it’s unclear if we’ll be picking up with Rembrandt and the gang on their hunt for Earth Prime or not. Maybe we could slide into an alternate history, following a different Quinn, one who has spent 30 years jumping from reality to reality. When asked in 2018, O’Connell suggested it would follow someone else.
"I mean, there's no way I'll be the star... I'm sure I'll be playing the star's Dad or something! Or the kid's grandfather. 'Back in my day, we knew how to slide... we knew what was what...',” O’Connell told Digital Spy.
Of course, Quinn Mallory didn’t Slide alone, and any true reboot should see the return of the rest of the multiverse menagerie, including John Rhys-Davies as Professor Arturo. Fans of the show know that Arturo’s fate wasn’t totally clear. While one reading of the narrative says he is dead, another suggests he might still be out there, somewhere in the infinite expanse of Earths. Fortunately, Rhys-Davies is game to return.
“I would do it again, if just to show how it should be done. It could have been the best show on television, it could still be on the air. I think maybe if we got another chance at doing it with the new technology, but also new stories, I think we could do something quite extraordinary. I wouldn’t want to do it for the rest of my life, but I would do it for a season or two if it was right,” Rhys-Davies told Flickering Myth at the 2019 Toronto Comicon.
It takes more than star power to get any show off the ground, even the reboot of a beloved science fiction classic, and in 2021 co-creator Tracy Tormé finally confirmed that a return of Sliders was in the works. He didn’t reveal any specific details, noting that agreements were still in the works, but suggested we would see old characters from the original show alongside new Sliding companions.
"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 (Rembrandt Brown) 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. 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. But this one is real; we’re actively working on it,” Tormé told Bleeding Fool.
Despite what looked like a clear portal to a reboot, in Hollywood and in Sliders you’re not home until you’re home. Things have likely changed since Tormé had that conversation in 2021. About a year and a half later, in October of 2022, O’Connell suggested things had stalled, at least where he was concerned. “I called up the people who have the show ... They have not called me back. I called them during the pandemic. It has been over two years now, and I am still waiting for a call back,” O’Connell told Paste Magazine.
Whatever Tormé had planned for a possible Sliders revival is unlikely to see the light of day. Tormé died January 4, 2024, of complications from diabetes, according to The Hollywood Reporter and the portal may have closed with him. Unless someone else picks up the mantle, Quinn’s sliding Timer may have finally reached zero for the last time.
