2022 NBCUniversal Media, LLC Credit: Serguei Bachlakov/NBCQuantum Leap
NBC
Premieres: Sept. 19
Airs: Mondays at 10pm ET/PT
Who’s In It? Raymond Lee, Caitlin Bassett, Ernie Hudson, Mason Alexander Park, Nanrisa Lee
What’s It All About? Fans of NBC’s 1989-93 sci-fi series Quantum Leap may have been tempted to mutter, “Oh, boy” — the frequent catchphrase of main character Dr. Sam Beckett — when it was announced that the beloved time-travel show would be rebooted.
But this revival has some good things going for it that make it worth checking out. For one thing, original creator/writer/executive producer Donald P. Bellisario, and original writer/EP Deborah Pratt (who also provided the original’s narration and voiced the self-aware supercomputer Ziggy), are both back as producers.
Additionally, while able to be enjoyed as a stand-alone new series, this Quantum Leap can also be seen as a sixth-season continuation of the original; it inhabits the same universe, taking place 30 years after Beckett entered his Quantum Leap accelerator and never came back, seemingly stuck hopping in and out of various people’s lives across time. Now, a new team is restarting the project to hopefully understand the mysteries behind the machine and the man who created it.
This team is led by physicist Dr. Ben Song (Raymond Lee), who, after making an unauthorized leap into the past, finds himself stuck in Beckett’s predicament: jumping into other people’s lives across various decades, righting past wrongs while he and his teammates look for a way to bring him back to his own life. Ben is helped by Addison (Caitlin Bassett), a decorated Army veteran who brings levelheaded precision to her job, and who appears in the form of a hologram that only he can see and hear.
Ernie Hudson’s character, no-nonsense career military man Herbert “Magic” Williams, heads the new Quantum Leap program. Fans of the previous series may recall this character (played by another actor) as the Vietnam War veteran Beckett leaped into in Season 3’s second episode, “The Leap Home: Part 2 (Vietnam),” in 1990.
Rounding out the team are Mason Alexander Park as Ian Wright, who runs the Ziggy artificial intelligence unit, and Nanrisa Lee as Jenn Chou, who heads up digital security for the confidential project.
With Beckett still a part of this new series’ mythology, and perhaps still out there leaping through time, fans have been wondering if former star Scott Bakula may appear at some point to reprise that role, especially given the mixed feelings that came when the original series’ 1993 finale ended with the note that Sam Beckett never returned home. Nothing on that has yet been confirmed; if it does happen, we imagine it won’t be right away, so as to give viewers a chance to fully get to know the new characters.
