As ‘Quantum Leap’ Turns 30, We Look Back at the Show with Scott Bakula, Dean Stockwell and Don Bellisario

Leaping Back to the Beginning

Recalling the development period of Quantum Leap, Donald Bellisario — who created, among other shows, Magnum, P.I., JAG and NCIS —explains, “I didn’t want to do another cop show, another detective show, another action-adventure doctor show, lawyer show, whatever. I was trying to look for a format that would give me an opportunity to do a completely different kind of show. I wanted to be able to do an anthology. I was also reading a book by Timothy Ferris called Coming of Age in the Milky Way. It’s a layman’s explanation of how we deal with our universe, covering many areas, including the concept of time. At the same time, I was fooling around with the idea of doing something set in the Southwest — something a bit mystical. So, essentially, to make a very long story short, those two ideas converged to form the seed to Quantum Leap. I was reading Einstein’s theories of time and I suddenly went, ‘Wait a minute, what if I did a time travel show? No way, never sell a time travel show.’”

Time Travel with Limits

Recalls Don, “I woke up at four one morning and said, ‘What if he only travels in his own lifetime? People will believe that. And if I can get a star or two that people will like to watch every week, they’ll tune in to watch them on their adventures, and then I can do any kind of story I want to do every week. It will be a lot of freedom.’ And, boy, was I wrong on that. It was so hard to write this show. I was right and I was wrong.

“Since Sam Beckett, our protagonist-hero, was born in 1953 and it’s was then the early 1990s,” he adds, “the storyline dictates that he can only travel as far back as the date of his birth and right up to and no further than present day. This makes the show more realistic. The minute you start showing your character popping up with Napoleon or someplace in Ancient Rome, it becomes unbelievable. But if it’s 1956, it’s not that much different than today — or 1965 or ’72 or ’78 — whatever. So I thought, ‘That’s great. I can use the time travel device, bounce him around and yet it will be familiar to people. Viewers can identify with certain periods in their own lives. It will be fun.’”

Just a Bit On the Technical Aspect of the Show

“Dean’s character of Al is a hologram that is from the experiment that is tuned to Sam’s mind,” details Don, “so that only he can see and hear Dean. And where Dean is actually standing, some place in the present, is this vast facility in an empty room with nothing around, he sees a hologram Scott and everything around Scott. Al also is more interested in the personal problems that he has going on at the moment, such as the lady he just left in his bed back there to come out and work with Sam, than he is with getting Sam back.

“And one more element adds to it, and that is that this time experiment that Sam was the first man to go into has obviously gone into the control of something or someone else — God, time — that has grabbed hold of him, put him here and said, ‘I want you to do something right that went wrong when it originally happened. And once that’s accomplished you’ll bounce out, quantum leap out’ and maybe back to where he belongs. But, of course, every time it happens, he just bounces into other people’s lives and replaces them to solve a problem.”

Challenges of Time Tripping

When he thinks about the series, Scott expresses, “It was a challenge, and what made it even more challenging was that I was assuming some of but not all of each personality. I tried to get the flavor of different people at different times. 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.”

Meet Al, Sam’s Holographic Pal

Veteran actor Dean Stockwell, whose credits range from stage to screen to television (most recently a recurring role as a Cylon on the acclaimed Battlestar Galactica reboot), signed aboard to play Al, the holographic companion who tries to help Sam accomplish his tasks in time while simultaneously working on a way to get him home. “Quantum Leap was the first time I was offered a series and the first time I wanted one,” he relates. “It struck me as an original concept something unique, and a show of top quality. It’s a fantastic concoction, really. Albert, my character, which was embellished as the series went along, has lots of facets. He’s obviously a brilliant guy. He was a physicist, an astronaut and is a colorful person who obviously still enjoys life. He’s also interested in other people’s problems and does everything he can to help them.

“But they didn’t say they wanted me to play a hologram,” he adds. “It came to my attention there was this role in this project and I went and Don and I read it and I thought it was wonderfully written. The aspect of the hologram is really incidental when you’re talking about the acting of the role. That’s what suit you have on, really, and it’s kind of kicky. I like it. I think it’s more kick from an audience point of view than from mine. But the role has a great deal of humor to it. This is a wry, ironic, worldly guy who’s brilliant in scientific endeavors, but also likes life and likes his women and he maybe likes gambling and the high life, yet he’s obliged to go back to the past and help someone that he loves who is almost like his son, a little bit. It’s a very rich role.”

In Praise of Dean Stockwell

In considering Dean Stockwell and his on screen persona of Al, Scott enthuses, “The joy of his character was that every once in a while he would open that door just a little crack and you would see something maybe about his sister, or something about his relationship with something else. Or something would happen in his life, or we’d be in the middle of Vietnam — those kinds of things were 10 times more powerful than the stuff that I was going through every week, because he was and is such a tough guy. And you expect him not to have any of that stuff creep through. So when it did, I thought it was powerful. And those were instances where he would never let me know what was coming; he would just kind of drop it on me and I would be in awe.”

‘Quantum Leap’ Was About Relationships, Not Issues

As Scott explains it, Don Bellisario had one goal in mind in creating Quantum Leap: To entertain the audience. “His philosophy about television is to entertain,” he notes. “He would deny that he had underlying objectives. 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’t 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 Kiss with History

One of the big questions surrounding the series at the time was whether or not Sam’s impact on these people’s lives will alter the flow of history. “No,” says Don. “I decided I wasn’t going to worry about historical impact. These are very small scale, human stories — stories about ordinary people and relationships. Sam was not out to save John Kennedy in Dallas. He was not out to prevent the Challenger disaster. He was involved in making the lives of everyday people a little bit happier. In each episode we tried to work within that ‘kiss with history’ — meaning that we share our own theory within the framework of a given episode as to how something happened or came to be. Sometimes it’s part of the main storyline, but most often it has nothing to do with the story. For example, in one episode there’s a picnic and somebody by the name of Frisbee picks up a pie tin and tosses it in the air. Somebody picks it up and tosses it back. And Sam thinks, ‘So that’s how those things were invented.’ In another episode, we have Sam as a veterinarian who has this assistant who’s always fooling around on the guitar making up songs for animals. One time he’s singing to the pigs, ‘Piggy, Piggy, Piggy Sue.’ Just fooling around, and Sam says, ‘Hey, kid, try “Peggy Sue.”’ And we think, ‘Oh, “Peggy Sue.” That’s Buddy Holly.’ I wanted the kiss with history to be funny. I wanted it to be something the audience does not see coming, and then catches them and it tickles them. But I’ll tell you, it was very hard to make it work.”

Final Thoughts on ‘Quantum Leap’

Quantum Leap ran from March 1989 through May 1993, producing a total of 97 episodes over the course of those five years. In the final episode, Sam Beckett did not leap home again, closing narration telling us that he never did.

As Don Bellisario told AVClub, “Truthfully, I didn’t know Sam wasn’t going home until the day before the last episode aired. That’s when I made the decision to let him continue leaping through time … he realized that he could have leaped home anytime, if that’s what he truly wanted.”

Whatever the fate of Sam Beckett, Scott Bakula, who has gone on to such series as Star Trek: Enterprise, Men of a Certain Age and NCIS: New Orleans, obviously holds nothing but the strongest of feelings for Quantum Leap.

“We had a great time on the show,” says Scott. “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.”

Note: The quotes for this retrospective came from a combination of exclusive interviews and convention appearances.