Jerry O’Connell on What He’d Do Different with a Sliders Revival (2025)

It’s been 30 years since Quinn Mallory (Jerry O’Connell) accidentally stumbled upon the secret to interdimensional travel while fiddling with gravity in his mother’s basement on the classic SYFY series, Sliders. Over the next five years, Mallory and the rest of the sliders explored dozens of Earths, each one different from the last. The series ended on a cliffhanger, Rembrandt “Crying Man” Brown (Cleavant Derricks) having jumped into a portal which may have returned him to his home universe, or may have killed him. Ever since, fans have been clamoring for Sliders to return.

Recently, O’Connell posted his own thoughts about a potential revival online. “I love my experience and everyone involved but come Season 3, we had all new bosses. A lot more guns/CGI/Explosions. I personally preferred the first two seasons. If we ever reboot, that’s the direction I would go…”

Reality of the week, the early years of Sliders

When Sliders begins, Quinn Mallory is a graduate student hoping to build an antigravity machine in his basement. He takes a wrong turn somewhere and accidentally opens a portal to another reality. After a couple of preliminary experiments, he throws himself into the portal and arrives in a topsy turvy world.

After figuring out he has the power to visit alternate realities, Quinn gathers a crew made up of his favorite professor, Maximilian Arturo (John Rhys-Davies), his best friend Wade Wells (Sabrina Lloyd), and an unintended interdimensional interloper, the aforementioned Rembrandt Brown.

After an accident cuts the ties between them and their reality, the sliders are stuck jumping from one world to the next, never knowing where they’ll end up or for how long. Throughout the first season, the four of them visited a world decimated by deadly disease, a world threatened by asteroid impacts, a world where scientists are celebrities, and many more. Season 2 carries the trend, visiting worlds where alleged psychics run everything, where finance bros have gun duels, where San Francisco is a dinosaur preserve, and where time runs in reverse.

By the end of Season 2, the sliders had just become aware of the Kromaggs, a militaristic and technologically advanced humanoid species on a quest to crush all human-dominated realities. When the sliders returned for season 3, the show was evolving into something with a deeper mythology and a little less room for experimentation.

How Sliders changed in its later seasons

Beginning with Season 3, Sliders spent more time on action-oriented episodes meant to draw in new viewers, instead of the more thought-provoking stories of the first two seasons. You can see the shift in tone in the Season 3 premiere, “Rules of the Game,” when the sliders get dropped into a deadly live-action first-person-shooter. If they win, there’s a nice prize pool on offer, but if they lose, they die.

It’s also worth noting that “Rules of the Game” was meant to be the fifth episode of Season 3, but was moved to the premiere slot because of its action-heavy premise. The intended premiere, “Double Cross,” was moved to Season 3, Episode 2. The rest of the season features a world about to be destroyed by a pulsar, one overrun by zombies, one with bodysnatching parasites, and a world of artificially created human-animal hybrids. Behind the scenes, the show was beginning to change as well.

John Rhys-Davies left the show in the middle of Season 3, citing creative differences over the direction the show was going. Co-creators Robert K. Weiss and Tracy Tormé left around the same time and, as O’Connell suggested in his post, new bosses came in with a vision all their own. Sabrina Lloyd stuck around through the end of Season 3, but didn’t make the leap to Season 4, when the show transitioned from Fox to SYFY. Series star Connell stuck around until Season 4, but was replaced by an alternate Mallory in the final season. Of the original four sliders, only Derricks stuck around until the end.

Sliders was an opportunity to tell interesting science fiction stories with a familiar cast of characters. Its underlying premise allowed for new circumstances, new rules, and novel situations in every episode. It was the perfect mixture of continuous narrative and Twilight Zone style sci-fi anthology series. But as the series progressed and the multiverse mythology deepened, more and more time was spent on the overarching narrative leaving less time for exploring strange new worlds.

Is Sliders getting a reboot or revival?

Like Quinn Mallory himself, whether Sliders ever finds its way home again remains to be seen. There’s been talk of a reimagining for decades, none of which have yet materialized. Back in 2021, series creator Tracy Tormé confirmed his intention to revive the series with the original cast and a few new friends.

"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 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,” Tormé said.

A year later, O’Connell suggested that things had stalled, having not heard any update on the project. The fact that he’s talking about a revival again and suggesting a #SlidersRewatch, gives fans reason to hope that we might be in a reality where Sliders comes back.