AL QUANTUM LEAP TV

According to Einstein you can’t just be a third person in the past of the future – you’d have to replace something or someone.” “I’d been reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, and I brought this idea of quantum leaping to Don – the idea that you could be in two places at once – and said, ‘What if we did a show where he would step into the lives of other characters?’ Because time and space is limited. “Don wanted to do a show about time travel,” says Deborah, who was both a writer and executive producer on the series. Bellisario (whose CV also boasts Magnum P.I., Airwolf, and NCIS), Quantum Leap was developed along with Deborah Pratt, Bellisario’s then-wife and producing partner, also an actress and science-fiction novelist. With a righteous sense of compassion and social justice, Quantum Leap was woke before woke-ness was even a thing.Ĭreated by Donald P. With the help of the cigar-tooting Al (Dean Stockwell, who has died aged 85), a hologram projected from the future, Sam must “put right what once went wrong” before he can leap again, always hoping that his next leap will be the leap home. With each leap Sam takes the place of somebody else from history, usually an everyman, everywoman, or in one case every–erm–chimp (though he occasionally gets to be a bonafide historical figure such as Elvis or Lee Harvey Oswald).

Sometime during the futuristic, neon-lit Nineties, a time travel experiment goes “a little kaka” and unseen forces – vaguely described as “God or time or something” – intervene and send Sam (Scott Bakula) leaping around the years of his own lifetime.

AL QUANTUM LEAP TV

That was the hook of Quantum Leap, which first leapt onto TV screens in March 1989 and ran for five seasons, until 1993: you never knew where, when, or into whom Dr Sam Beckett would leap next. These were the first words from Dr Sam Beckett every time he “leaped” into a new body, a new time and place, and a new potentially fatal or – even worse – socially awkward scenario: as a pilot at the controls of a nose-diving aeroplane a soldier mid-firefight in the jungles of Vietnam swinging upside down in a trapeze act an actor on stage who doesn’t know his lines a male stripper being ravaged by over-excited ladies and locked in the throes of many, many romantic trysts.

Al quantum leap