Fox Movies

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

Originally seen on cable's Sci Fi Channel, the fifth and final season of Sliders continues the efforts by a group of time-and-space travelers to hopscotch from one alternate world to another, with the ultimate goal of saving their world (which of course is also our world) from the despotic reign of the warrior Kromagg race. In the course of events, the series loses its original leading man: Quinn Mallory, the college student who'd invented the device that enabled him and his companions to "slide" from world to world, is lost during a "bad slide," and at the same time his brother Colin is blown to smithereens. Though we may never see Colin again in this world, Quinn's life essences are transferred to another slider who is immediately rechristened Quinn Two -- a mighty slick method to replace departing cast member Jerry O'Connell with newcomer Robert Floyd. As for Quinn Two's sliding comrades, only Cleavant Derricks as Rembrandt Brown remains from the series' original cast; the other slider, Maggie Beckett (Kari Wuhrer), has been with the series since its third season. In addition to Quinn Two, Rembrandt, and Maggie, the slider team now boasts the services of African-American scientist Diana Davis (Tembe Locke). At the conclusion of the series, the team ends up on yet another alternate earth, where "slideology" has become a religion thanks to a prophet called The Seer, and the sliders' exploits have been dramatized on a cable TV show. (What was that old saying, "life imitates art?") Now it is up to our heroes to take this Earth's miraculous "anti-alien" virus to Rembrandt's Earth in order to squash the Kromagg -- but as so often happens on Sliders, things go awry, and the whole cycle starts all over again! ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi