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'Quantum Leap' reboot warps to NBC with pilot order featuring 'new team'
Scott Bakula mulled a revival last year… but we don’t know yet if he’ll be back.
Jump for joy, loyal leapers: NBC reportedly has ordered a pilot episode for a rebooted version of Quantum Leap, revisiting one of the most fondly-remembered and groundbreaking network sci-fi series of the past 30 years.
TVLine reports that NBC has green-lit a pilot order for an updated version of the series, one that fast-forwards three decades in time beyond the events of the 1989-1993 show that starred Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett and the late, great Dean Stockwell as Admiral Al Calavicci, his holographic partner in dimensional detective work.
Per the show's logline, the rebooted Quantum Leap would feature “a new team [that] has been assembled to restart” the Quantum Leap project “in the hopes of understanding the mysteries behind the machine and the man who created it.” While additional details are light (and, crucially, Bakula’s involvement hasn’t been confirmed), the new series reassembles the key creative pieces that first made the original Quantum Leap a major hit at NBC.
Don Bellisario, the original series’ creator, is reportedly on board as an executive producer for the new show, alongside former QL co-writer and co-producer Deborah Pratt (whose voice appeared as the older show’s intro narrator). Writing reportedly will come from Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt (God Friended Me), who are also executive producers alongside Martin Gero (Blindspot).
TVLine cites an unnamed source in reporting that Bakula’s potential return to the franchise he helped make famous is “to be determined.” Bakula confided to the late Bob Saget last year, during Saget’s weekly YouTube broadcast, that the topic perennially raised its head between himself and Bellisario — though sorting out the rights to the classic IP has “always been the biggest complication.”
The original Quantum Leap put Bakula’s Dr. Beckett on the case of resolving the lingering issues that plagued other people’s past lives, all thanks to the namesake machine that allowed him to leap into their physical bodies and experience events through their point of view.
For most longtime fans, Bakula and Stockwell were a package deal that gave the series its distinctive personality. Stockwell passed away in November 2021 at the age of 85; together, Bakula and Stockwell appeared together in 97 episodes of the original Quantum Leap series.
