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Why Jerry O’Connell Was Barely in Sliders’ Biggest Hit Episode
Blame a combination of network meddling, a ratings push, and a Hollywood sports movie starring Tom Cruise.
Back in 1996, the reality-hopping sci-fi adventure Sliders (streaming now on Peacock) was in its second season and scrambling for ratings. Jerry O’Connell served as leading man, but a combination of studio meddling, antiquated viewership methods, and the production of a beloved Tom Cruise flick conspired to remove O’Connell’s Quinn Mallory almost entirely from one of the season’s most popular episodes.
The seventh episode of Sliders’ second season, “In Dino Veritas,” begins with the sliders on a world where everyone tells the truth. They hop a portal to another reality and arrive in a dense forest of another world. They don’t see any people, but they do see some oversized eggs (which they accidentally break) and hear the howls of something large, before an Allosaurus emerges through the trees.
Creative disagreements and consumer ratings led the sliders to a dinosaur world (sans Jerry O'Connell) in “In Dino Veritas”
By Season 2, series creator Tracy Tormé had been having run-ins with the network about the direction of the show. Fox was a relative newcomer in original television programming at the time, and the network was chasing ratings, even at the expense of story.
In decades past, the success of a show was determined in part by viewing information tracked by individual consumers. Every year the Nielsen Company would deliver diaries to homes in select cities. Families would track what they watched for a week, then Nielsen would sweep across the country from east to west, collecting the diaries. Today, viewing data is collected a little differently, but the period known as Sweeps Week has left an indelible mark on how television gets made.
For Sweeps Week 1996, Tormé wanted to air the episode “Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome,” an episode in which Quinn and the gang think they’ve found their way home, only to discover later that they haven’t. Fox wanted something flashier, and they went with the dinosaur episode, complete with a dino-centric ad campaign to drum up viewers, according to a conversation Tormé had with Earth Prime.
“I saw the promotion and I thought, ‘Oh, Christ,’ ‘cause we can’t do Jurassic Park, and we can’t do Twister like the movies can do it. To me, that’s worrisome… It worked,” Tormé said. “That’s probably one of the reasons we came back for another season; the ratings on that episode were that good. I’ll give the devil its due.”
Why Jerry O’Connell was hardly in Sliders’ most popular Season 2 episode, “In Dino Veritas”
“In Dino Veritas” was conceived as a bottle episode to cut production costs. In its original conception, the episode would have taken place almost entirely in a cave, allowing it to be shot on a single set at minimal cost. Later, Tormé realized the dinosaur effects weren’t as expensive as expected and the episode was expanded beyond just the cave.
In the meantime, the writers found a convenient excuse to get Quinn off camera so that O’Connell could ply his talents elsewhere. As the sliders are running from the Allosaurus, Dr. Arturo (John Rhys-Davies) trips, injures his leg, and drops the sliding timer. The group retreats to a cave and Quinn returns to the outside to retrieve the timer, their only means of escape. Most of the rest of the episode follows Wade, Arturo, and Rembrandt as they balance dinosaurs and human poachers on a prehistoric nature reserve. Cameron Crowe’s 1996 sports movie Jerry Maguire was shooting at the same time and O’Connell found himself in the role of superstar quarterback Frank Cushman. Even with the benefit of sliding technology, he couldn’t be in two places at once.
“We decided we’d let Jerry [O’Connell] do this thing in Jerry Maguire. So that’s why Quinn leaves the cave and you can’t find him for a long time. Jerry was off shooting Jerry Maguire during those days. And then we realized we could do a better dinosaur than we thought we could for the money. At that point the temptation came to broaden the story a bit and take advantage of it, so ultimately what started as our very simple little bottle show ended up as one of our most popular shows and certainly one of our most promoted shows,” Tormé said.
Fortunately, Quinn (and O’Connell) made it back in time for the end of the episode and the slide to another world. You can catch up with them on Sliders, streaming now on Peacock!
