Quantum Leap (1989)

The premise

Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) is a physicist with a theory: a person could time-travel within his own lifetime. He gets government backing for the idea, and years later Project Quantum Leap has cost $43 billion and its funding is under threat. So Sam tests the accelerator on himself, without telling anyone.

He wakes up in the past with partial amnesia, which he compares to a hunk of Swiss cheese. He's physically there, but everyone else sees the person he has "leapt" into. In the two-hour pilot, "Genesis," he first works this out when a stranger's face looks back at him from the mirror while he's shaving. Small wonder his catchphrase on arrival is "Oh, boy!"

His help is Rear Admiral Albert "Al" Calavicci (Dean Stockwell), his best friend and the project's Observer, who appears as a hologram only Sam can see and hear. With the project's supercomputer, Ziggy, feeding him information, Al tells Sam that something here "went wrong" and he has to fix it. Once he does, he's off into another life, hoping each time that this one will be the leap that takes him home.

Most episodes stand alone, with a new host, a new year, and a new set of people around him. The show can be a comedy one week and a social drama the next, with romance and science fiction mixed in.

How it handles time

The pitch carries the first rule: Sam travels, with rare exceptions, only within his own lifetime. His in-story birthday is August 8, 1953, so nearly every leap lands somewhere between the '50s and the near future he left. For a network drama that's a smart limit: a fresh period setting every week, with no history lecture required.

The mirror is the show's best device. Other characters see the host and the audience sees Bakula; the host's face only shows up as Sam's reflection, which Wikipedia calls "the usual way that the host is shown during an episode." The opening narration, as The A.V. Club transcribes it, has Sam "facing mirror images that were not his own," and every mirror in a scene reminds you whose life he's borrowing.

Al has rules of his own. He's a hologram tuned to Sam's brainwaves, projected from the Imaging Chamber back at the project, so normally nobody else in the scene knows he's there. Al reads Ziggy's answers off a handheld device that Wikipedia describes as "faulty." Meanwhile, the person Sam replaced waits back at the project, in the Waiting Room.

Sam also designed Ziggy, the "parallel hybrid computer with a massive ego" (Wikipedia's phrase). Ziggy has a feminine personality, holds historical records covering Sam's lifetime, and can project the likely effect of Sam's actions on history. Its forecasts come as probabilities, and I like that choice a lot. Al can tell Sam the odds went up or down, and the plot gets a running scoreboard without becoming a checklist.

What moves Sam from life to life is left vague on purpose. Ziggy works on the assumption that Sam has to change the past to correct the future before he can go home, and in the pilot Al suggests some unknown influence (Wikipedia sums it up as "God, Fate, or Time") is using Sam to fix mistakes. The memory gaps are part of the design, too. Deborah Pratt credits Bellisario with the idea and says Al "was not allowed to tell him what was happening in the present." Wikipedia adds that the holes let the writers fill in Sam's character as the show went on.

So does it keep its own rules? Mostly. Lifetime only, the mirror, and the invisible Al hold for the bulk of the run, and the later seasons bend each of them at least once (the details are in the spoiler section). Because nobody aims the leaps, the show rarely has to answer for a paradox. The leap simply ends when the job is done.

What works

Bakula has to rebuild Sam inside a different life every week while playing a man who can't remember his own. He won the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series – Drama in 1992 and was nominated for the lead-actor Emmy every year from 1990 to 1993. Stockwell won the Golden Globe for supporting actor in 1990 and matched Bakula's four Emmy nominations. The partnership outlived the show: they reunited on Star Trek: Enterprise ("Detained," 2002) and NCIS: New Orleans ("Chasing Ghosts," 2014).

The anthology engine is the other big asset. Bellisario saw the premise as a way to make an anthology series at a time when networks didn't like them, and the range shows in the awards list. "Good Night, Dear Heart" won an Edgar Award for Best Television Episode for writer Paul Brown, and Michael Zinberg won a DGA Award for directing "The Leap Home (Part 2) – Vietnam."

The weekly reset also makes for a fun guest list. The Golden Globes' cast list for the show includes Jennifer Aniston, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Neil Patrick Harris, Jason Priestley, Teri Hatcher, and Roddy McDowall. Sam also crosses paths with real people such as Buddy Holly, Marilyn Monroe, and Michael Jackson, and in one episode he leaps into Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who plays herself.

The craft got noticed, too. The show won six Emmys from 32 nominations, according to the Television Academy, including cinematography in 1989 (Roy H. Wagner, for the pilot), 1990, and 1991 (both Michael Watkins), plus hairstyling and makeup awards and a 1993 editing win for Jon Koslowsky. Mike Post wrote the theme. Pratt's narration, which plays at the start of nearly every episode according to The A.V. Club, gives the show its mission statement: "put right what once went wrong."

What doesn't

The future barely exists on screen. Project Quantum Leap's staff, including head programmer Gooshie (Dennis Wolfberg), psychiatrist Dr. Verbena Beeks (Candy Ann Brown), and medical technician Tina (Gigi Rice), are mentioned often but appear in only a handful of episodes. With so little of that world in view, the "leap home" stays more of a refrain in the narration than a place I ever pictured.

The formula is also the format. Nearly every hour runs on the same track of arrival, mirror, Al's briefing, and a fix, and across 97 episodes that repetition shows if you watch several in a row. I'd take it one or two episodes at a sitting.

And sometimes history gets personal. The two-hour "Lee Harvey Oswald," the Season 5 premiere, was written by Bellisario, who, per Wikipedia citing the Los Angeles Times, met the real Oswald in 1959 when both were in the Marine Corps. He wrote the episode in response to the 1991 film JFK, so it comes with a point of view on a real case. That's worth knowing before you press play.

Check the music before you buy discs. Universal's remastered DVDs replaced many original songs for rights reasons (Season 5 kept all of its music), and fans objected. Mill Creek's complete-series DVD and Blu-ray from February 7, 2017, restored most of the original music.

Final score

Overall: 8/10. The two leads and the anthology range earn it, while the thin future and the weekly formula keep it from a 9.

Paradox Meter: 3/5. The three core rules are clear and visual, but the "unknown force" covers every question the show would rather not answer, and the later seasons bend all three.

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• Quantum Leap (2022): NBC's revival, which follows the original's continuity and ran for two seasons without Bakula. (not on the site yet)
• Source Code (2011): Duncan Jones gave Bakula a voice cameo, "Oh, boy" included, as a nod to the show. (not on the site yet)