I wish I could say the last couple of days have been a whirlwind of excitement and that’s why I haven’t posted here. But unless you count a handful of Quantum Leap episodes as excitement — and it’s still a good show, but I wouldn’t go that far — that really won’t hold up under close examination. Thanks to the snow, I didn’t even go to my weekly writing group. Which is a shame, because aside from the morning pages I haven’t been doing any writing at all. And today, I didn’t even remember to do the morning pages until 2:30 in the afternoon.
Mostly, I’ve been going to work in the morning, watching over the dog, getting woken up several times in the middle of the night by the dog, and going to bed earlier than usual just so getting woken up by the dog won’t lose me the decent night’s sleep I need to go to work in the morning.
Plus some Quantum Leap. It holds up surprisingly well.
But unless you count a handful of Quantum Leap episodes as excitement — and it’s still a good show, but I wouldn’t go that far — that really won’t hold up under close examination.
I was going to say that maybe that depends on the episodes, but on further reflection… Nah, it probably doesn’t. Still, as you say, it’s definitely a show that holds up better than you’d expect.
I think the lead actors are a huge part of that. Bakula and Stockwell are just so good at what they do, particularly together. But it’s also pretty well cast in the supporting roles week to week. It’s struck me, though, as I’ve been re-watching it, that this isn’t the sort of show that gets made anymore. It would be a whole lot less episodic were it made today, and there would be a lot more back story about Project Quantum Leap and whatever force is sending Sam through time. The mechanics and world-building would be more of the focus, not just an excuse to tell small period stories week to week.
Yeah, those two are terrific together, and clearly seem to be having fun in their roles. Without the right actors, I think that series could have been terrible, because those characters are not, objectively, all that believable. But, you know, I totally bought Bakula as a super-sensitive martial arts expert scientific genius farmboy. (Hoo, boy, did I… But let us not discuss my embarrassing TV crushes. ;))
And that kind of TV definitely doesn’t get made any more, certainly not for a high-concept SF show sort of thing. Personally, I love, love, love the current trend towards complex, continuity-heavy stories, but there is some real charm to those old self-contained episodic stories, when they’re done well.