Sliders: Season 01 (1995)

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Originally telecast on the Fox network, season one of Slidersopens as college student Quinn Mallory (Jerry O'Connell) develops a device resembling a TV remote-control which enables him to open a portal to what seems to be a different universe. Entering the portal, he is disappointed to find that he is right back where he started, in the San Francisco of 1995. And yet, there are subtle differences: Elvis Presley still lives, the colors of traffic lights are reversed (green now means stop), and so on. Clearly he has stepped into some sort of parallel San Francisco, and upon this discovery, Quinn summons his grumpy psychic professor Arturo (John Rhys-Davies) and his computer-store co-worker (and erstwhile girlfriend) Wade Wells (Sabrina Lloyd) to test out the device again. Inadvertently swept into the trio's next foray into an alternate world is Rembrandt "Crying Man" Brown (Cleavant Derricks), a has-been pop singer en route to a gig that might have enabled him to make a comeback. In rapid succession, the four sliders end up in a contemporary San Francisco still mired in the Ice Age, then emerge in the same city at the same time -- only now San Francisco is a satellite of the old Soviet Union! For the rest of the series' first season, the protagonists hopscotch through a variety of alternate worlds in their efforts to return to their own world. In the process, they foment a second American Revolution (seems the British won the first one back in 1776); they save a parallel San Francisco from destruction by an asteroid; they enter a realm in which the '60s hippie movement is still alive and well; they show up in a Frisco where women hold all the big jobs and men are subservient; and, in the series finale, Wade is targeted for extermination when, in a utopian San Francisco, she draws a winning lottery ticket that doubles as her death warrant (shades of Shirley Jackson!). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi