‘Quantum Leap’ Star Scott Bakula Faced Unique Challenges On The Original Show

In a sense, it kind of feels like we’ve all been through the Quantum Accelerator when you stop to consider that the original Quantum Leap made its debut 33 years ago. With the new version set to premiere on September 19 on NBC, one might be prone to ask, where has all that time gone? Time, of course, was always on the mind of original series star Scott Bakula, who played no small part in making the series so unique.

In the show, which aired from 1989 to 1993, time experimentation by Bakula’s Dr. Sam Beckett goes wrong, resulting in his bouncing around in time, each episode seeing him leap into the body of someone whose life he has to impact, making right what once went wrong. The thing is, to everyone around him — and in any reflection of himself — he looks like the person whose body he’s occupying, while the audience sees him as Beckett. Accompanying him on this journey through time is a hologram of project observer Al (Dean Stockwell), who only Sam can see. As he shifts from time period to time period, the hope is that someday he’ll make the leap home.

Acting Challenges

“Quantum Leap made me very flexible as an actor and allowed me to approach each week’s character from as fresh a place as possible,” says Bakula, who at any moment could find himself a boxer, Rabbi, Mafia hit man, a pregnant woman or even a chimpanzee. “Because of the series’ nature, I wasn’t wrapped up in some identifiable character, so the word got around the industry that I could do many different things. I liked the sense of being in the hot seat and having to put up or shut up. It’s easy to get distracted by the technical aspect of the show if you really want to get into the time travel and quantum physics and all those theories involved — you could easily get lost. To me, it’s a show about relationships; somebody who finds himself in a strange place and gets involved with the people that are there in his life. And this guy becomes kind of like a classic American hero, caring about the people and doing good things because he wants to do them.”

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Bakula, whose credits include Star Trek: Enterprise and NCIS: New Orleans, admits that the series was challenging, made more so by the fact that his character assumed some, but not all, of each personality he leaps into. “I tried to get the flavor of different people at different times,” he explains. “I might pick one or two traits that I would use in an entire episode just to say, ‘Look, I’m that person.’ It was fun to find those little moments. We found out very early on that people who liked the show were willing to take the ride with us, go out on a limb and say, ‘Yeah, dazzle me.’ We really put ourselves out there the first time when I played a black man, and then the next year we tried a woman and then we kept pushing and pushing. The audience was saying, ‘Okay, give us more.’ What’s really cool is that when the show started popping up all over the world, people were responding to it in the same way they did here.”

Time Travel as Entertainment

As he notes, series creator Donald Bellisario had one goal in mind in creating Quantum Leap: entertaining the audience. “He would deny he had any underlying objectives,” Bakula points out. “When we would talk to him about issues, he would always say, ‘I’m not talking about issues. This is a relationship story; it’s about stories of the heart, it’s about humanity, it’s about feeling good.’ You look at all of Don’s shows, he always had very strong male relationships in them and that’s really what he wanted our show to be about. The other stuff kind of snuck in, but he didn’t show up in the morning and say, ‘Let’s do a show about the environment.’ He never approached it that way, and at times he fought people that wanted to do shows that had messages. I wanted to do a rape show — not after the rape. I wanted to leap in during the rape, but it wasn’t the kind of thing we could do.”

A total of 97 episodes of Quantum Leap were produced over the course of its five year run. In the final episode, Sam Beckett did not leap home again, the closing narration telling us we never did. Whatever the fate of the character, it’s obvious that Bakula has nothing but the strongest feelings for Quantum Leap.

“We had a great time on the show,” he says. “It was hard work, but it was worth it. And it’s especially worth it now, because it’s popular all over the world. It would be terrible to be traveling to different countries, as actors do, feeling like, ‘Oh, God, I wish I wasn’t in that show; I never liked doing it.’ The truth of the matter is, you sign a contract for five or seven years and you just never know where it will take you. But I’m real proud of Quantum Leap. We were making little hour-long movies in seven to 10 days and every one was different. The stories that we were able to tell, and the way we told them, were exciting.”

All of which made his lack of involvement with the new version of Quantum Leap surprising and disappointing to the show’s fans, though he recently addressed this on Twitter in multiple tweets. “First of all, thank you for hanging around through the decades,” he begins. “Here’s the simple version of what’s going on with the Quantum Leap reboot and me. I have no connection with the show, either in front of the camera or behind it. In January, the pilot was sold and a script was sent to me, because the character of Sam Beckett was in it, which makes sense, right? As so many of you have been asking me the last several months, ‘How could you do QL without Sam?’ (or Al, for that matter) Well, I guess we’re about to find out.

“That’s the story,” he continues. “As the show has always been near and dear to my heart, it was a very difficult decision to pass on the project. A decision that has upset and confused so many fans of the original series. However, the idea of anyone ‘leaping’ around in time and walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, remains a very appealing concept and so worthy of exploration, especially given the current state of mankind. In that spirit, I am crossing my fingers that this new cast and crew are lucky enough to tape into the magic that propelled the original Quantum Leap into the hearts and minds of generations past and present. I wish them good luck and happy leaping.”

Fans remain hopeful that, if the sequel series is successful, Bakula himself will leap back into Quantum Leap as a guest star.