Well well look what's coming back. QUANTUM LEAP! Finally a reboot, reimagining, sequel or whatever that I look forward to seeing knowing it could very well suck.
I was still in NBC research in New York when the QL pilot was made. It was picked up but did not get on the schedule until March of 1989. I was sent a set of all the NBC pilots that were picked up since my job was to do the ratings estimates on the new schedule which were used by sales in the upfront.
I remember it was a Sunday evening and I popped the QL pilot in the old VCR player. The Masked Wife was putting our daughter to bed and said she would join me in a few minutes. I started watching the pilot which I believe was two hours and immediately passed out. Two hours later the Masked Wife was shaking me all excited.
"How come you didn't tell me about this show" she asked
"Why?
"I loved it!"
She's never wrong and QL stayed around for five seasons.
Like many shows QL occupied many time periods over its run. I remember in May of 1990 when Brandon Tartikoff was still head of entertainment he asked me to help him out with the upfront presentation. The show was moving time periods again and I pitched him a joke. "If it can leap through time it can leap through time periods" I was met with stone cold silence from Brandon.
In the 92-93 season we replaced MATLOCK and IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT on Tuesday night with QL and REASONABLE DOUBTS. At the upfront presentation we put up a picture of Andy Griffith and Carroll O'Connor which morphed into Scott Bakula, Marlee Matlin and Mark Harmon to show how we were aging down the night. Now that I am 71 I sort of regret that.
We had a bit of controversy when we aired a gay-themed episode. There was a lot of debate about running it. We did and took a substantial hit from several advertisers pulling out. They were replaced by the "bottom feeders".
In 2017 when we had a WGA strike and were looking for shows that we could reshoot with no change to the script I immediately thought of QUANTUM LEAP but because it was a Universal property we couldn't pursue it. I was surprised that NBC didn't think about that.
Anyway, I look forward to its return and hope not to be disappointed. This one is a no brainer.
