Hacker Cinema
Quantum Leap
1989 · TV series · 48 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by Donald P. Bellisario
Science FictionFantasyActionAdventureDrama
Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished... He woke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home.
2 positive14 neutralfrom 16 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
18 comments on Hacker News
Domingo Gonsales is flown to the moon by tying himself to wild swans, and meets Lunar Christians - The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin (1601)
Manned mission to the Moon by giant gun - Jules Verne (1865 ish).
Manned trip around Saturn by comet - Jules Verne (1877).
Time traveller sets off to the future - H.G. Wells (1894)
Martian invasion of Earth - War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1905)
Global telephone network reaches as many connections as a human brain and wakes up - Dial 'F' for Frankenstein, Arthur C Clarke (December 1, 1975)
Birth of Dr Susan Calvin, founding of US Robotics & Mechanical Men, development of 'Positronic Brain' - Asimov's robot stories (1982 and after)
British space station under construction - The Outward Urge by John Wyndham (1994)
Portal to parallel universes - Sliders (1994)
Doctor Samuel Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanishes - Quantum Leap (1995)
Skynet becomes self-aware - Terminator 2 Judgement Day (August 29, 1997. at 02:14 am Eastern Time)
HAL 9000 AI computer operational (1997), first human voyage to Jupiter system (2001), first landing on Europa and alien life discovered (2010) - Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey
Moon leaves Earth Orbit after nuclear waste explosion, taking human-occupied Lunar colony with it - Space:1999 (13 September 1999)
Efficient international flight, using Zeppelins and blimps - Rudyard Kipling (2000)
Global climate disaster - The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Replicants - Bladerunner (2016)
Keanu Reeves smuggles digital information in his brain - Johnny Mnemonic (2021)
Arnold Schwarzenegger kills to survive in a typical American TV show - The Running Man (2025)
Woman relifed into robot, rich people discover workers' rights - Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2026)
First colony mission to Mars, 100 colonists on the largest spaceship ever built - Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (2026)
Tibetan monks finish listing all the names of God, stars start going out - The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke (when computers were rentable and could print 1000 names per second)
and many more: https://scifi.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_fictional_future_events
Always the same discussion about the TV series Quantum Leap, here.
AFAIK that usage traces back to the 1990s TV show "Quantum Leap", in which the protagonist would travel in space & time to a new place each episode.
The phrase 'Quantum Leap', then, was popularly taken to mean a large change.
The damage done to the vernacular by that show's title is only exceeded by the damage done to the vernacular by another piece of 1990s popular culture, Alanis Morissette's song 'Ironic'.
Like a DIY Quantum Leap episode? Yeah I would just try to do the same stuff again. Although chaos/quantum theory means I’ll probably change everything!
One thing might interest this community - the amusing amount of common actors between the Columbo and Star Trek series (and Quantum Leap, if you want to extend this).
Obviously Shatner and Nimoy, but also the lovable John Fiedler (of 12 Angry Men fame, as the possessed Mr. Hengist in TOS's "Wolf in the Fold" and a cardiologist in Columbo) and the fantastic Theodore Bikel (as the murderer in Columbo's "Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case", and as Worf's adoptive dad in TNG's "Family"). Ed Begley Jr, whose father was in 12 Angry Men, is in ST:VOY as Henry Starling, and in Columbo's "How to Dial a Murder" as Officer Stein. Laurence Luckinbill is Sybok (STrek V) and the victim in Columbo's "Make Me a Perfect Murder". Michael Strong: Columbo's "are you a witness to what he just did?" scene, and TOS's Dr Korby.
There are metric tons of links with minor characters, for example James Greene in the Columbo classic "Columbo Goes to the Guillotine" is also in TNG and DS9.
Dozens more are discussed here: http://pub10.bravenet.com/forum/static/show.php?usernum=806565873&frmid=6&msgid=1308831&cmd=show
There are other amusing non-Star Trek but sci-fi-related coincidences too, like Robert Culp (IMO the best Columbo villain, a first-rate actor) voicing Dr. Breen in Half-Life 2.
Obviously you could do this with absolutely any TV show, since there aren't that many actors in America, but this is a fun exercise and fans of both shows have a lot to be happy about. And if you're a fan of one, and start watching the other (I started with Columbo, possibly unlike most people here), try spotting common actors as a fun exercise.
> How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?
The issue you're failing to separate out is that you're talking about entertainment with television. Websites are largely not comparable in entertainment value, and most are not entertaining at all. People will pay a lot for entertainment. That's why blogs are worth $... today and Netflix is worth $226 billion. If people would pay so much for eg blogs (or, again, any other comparable content), there'd be a $100 billion company extracting that monthly payment for producing volumes of written content on websites. Some blog network would have actually succeeded and become a global content juggernaut.
Most of the content online is not of high quality and people will not pay for it, or they'll pay so little for it as to be a sad joke.
Which website compares to the joy and value people extracted from Friends, Seinfeld, MASH, Fresh Prince, I Love Lucy, and dozens of other prominent TV shows from the past ~50 years. Much less the even higher production shows like Sopranos or Game of Thrones. There may be a select few and they're billion dollar services like Reddit with huge volumes of low value content. Do millions of people still talk lovingly about some websites from 2006 like they do decades later about I Love Lucy? Hell no they don't, only a tiny niche group of people does that.
People go back and watch movies over and over again for decades. They listen to the same songs/bands/albums regularly for decades.
Does the average person go back and dig up long dead websites and go through them start to finish on Archive.org, like they do old TV shows they enjoyed (Quantum Leap, ALF, Golden Girls, whatever). Hell no they don't, again, only a very very tiny group of people would do such a thing.
Most online text content is not very entertaining, even in the best case scenarios, that's the difference between the concepts.
Is there lots of funny, amusing, entertaining text content on eg Reddit? You bet. And people will pay pennies for it - if at all - because it's of low value compared to high quality, higher production value entertainment. They'll pay what it's worth, a pittance.
They used that a whole bunch for the mirror scenes in Quantum Leap where Sam would look in the mirror and see himself as whoever he leaped into and there was someone else in the scene. That series was a boon for actors who had identical twins.
The other identical twin thing I remember was an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Xander was split into two, one of him all his strengths and the other all his weaknesses. Nicholas Brendon's twin brother was used in the scenes where there were two Xanders in one shot.
Nobody lives forever.
The other day I was comparing the movie "Forrest Gump" to the TV show "Quantum Leap".
Both recapitulate the time period 1950-1985.
Forrest Gump is an idiot who stumbles through situations without understanding their significance; somehow he comes out on top of a life put together from the covers of Time magazine. His childhood friend is a victim of drugs, AIDS and the counterculture.
Sam Beckett, the hero of Quantum Leap, "leaps" into a crisis in someone's life at the beginning of each episode; his mission to set right what once went wrong.
Sam is an expert physicist, pianist, martial artist, and actor. Sam agonizes over the problems of the people he leaps into. But you know he is satisfied, that he finds this mission to be meaningful -- even if he never gets home he's found a purpose for his intellect.
When I first saw "Forrest Gump" and the spell it cast over my older family I had the feeling, for the first time in my life, that I could kill someone (Robert Zemeckis, the director) because of the danger of their ideology.
I don't feel that way today, actually I like many Zemeckis films, but I was offended at the idea that you could let it all wash over you without experiencing a moment of critical distance.
Sam to me is like Faust from the 2nd part of Goethe's play, who escapes Mephistopheles clutches by finding, in the service of other people, a moment that he wishes time would stop.
I've had better satisfaction with "Amazon Instant Video" where you can pay to buy or rent a movie to stream.
Personally I have a backlog of at least a year of movies, TV shows, and video games so the idea of scanning through the interface at a site like Netflix to find "something to watch" is foreign to me.
(An exception to that was I found that OTA Comet TV plays three episodes of "Quantum Leap" four nights a week and I "appointment view" much of it -- but "Quantum Leap" happens to cover terrain that I'm particularly interested in, the relationship of art and life. I could stream it or get it on DVD but I prefer lame ads with beta bearded males and personal injury lawyers over a nerfed soundtrack.)
I think my brain runs at twice the cycle rate as other people's brains but the cycles are not so good so I make mistakes.
My reaction time is about 20-30% faster than my teenage son. I beat him at chess consistently even though I inevitably make one or two boneheaded mistake(s) early on but I have a good understanding how to open up and control the space I keep the pressure on relentlessly.
People have always told me not to sweat it about the mistakes that I make and that the fear of the mistakes is just going to cause more mistakes and maybe they are right.
In software I know I do exceptionally well at figuring out things like "where do I pull down data in this React application so that it can flow to all the places it needs to go" and it drives me up the wall that most people go about that kind of thing randomly and wonder why the layout is jumping up and down all the time but don't seem concerned that the render() method gets called 15 times when it only ought to get called once. Despite that, my boss catches an occasional howler of mine during a code review but that's why he does a code review.
I am in the process of rewriting my own internal "software" for interacting with people and I wouldn't know how to explain it or what I am doing except that I read a biography of Benjamin Disraeli and learn from it or watch an episode of Quantum Leap and see it as "performing arts about the performing arts" as opposed to science fiction.
That's funny, it was just on an old rerun of Quantum Leap the other day..
https://quantumleap.fandom.com/wiki/Maybe_Baby_(episode)
Thanks. The pattern isn't perfect but the trend is clear. These are Season 1, excluding pilots.
A-Team (1983): 49m
MacGyver (1985, original): 48m
Quantum Leap (1989): 47-48m
X-Files (1993): 43-44m
Monk (2002): 44m
Eureka (2006): 44m
MacGyver (2016, remake): 42-43m
I’m not forgetting anything. The actual shuttle missions were not a statistical experiment or a consistent action where you can say “well this is what happened so that was the chance of death on an individual shuttle flight.”
It only means that’s your chance if you have the technology from quantum leap (the tv show) and you randomly land in the body of one of the participants.
as I said already the shuttle and everything around it evolved. The crews changed. Trying to say “the actual chance of death was this based on how many people died.” is silly.
"It's interesting that you posit that the ultimate endgame is "corporate-friendly content". I was curious why you think that content is heading that way?"
Every company I've seen eventually goes this way. When a corporation becomes large enough, they start answering to special interest groups on the left/right and self-censoring content as to not tarnish the reputation of investors or lose valuable market share.
"If anything, I'd argue that globalizing Netflix combined with stronger control over their own original content enables Netflix to move towards an endgame where lots of niche audiences are served (rather than only mass markets). At CES, Ted Sarandos (VP of Content) mentioned that traditional TV had to hit home runs all the time, while Netflix can score with singles, double, etc. Why would Netflix jeopardize this advantage and hop in the time machine to become an outdated TV company?"
I hope you're right. So far, they are copying the cable company strategy: license older content to get the viewers and then eventually create your own content to make more money. It's a pretty good business strategy, if you can pull it off.
When the Syfy (I actually hate this name) channel first came out, it was all old episodes of Quantum leap, Star Trek, and lost in space. They slowly built their own content over the years and now pretty much only have original content.
It's also tends to happen with monopolies (if this ever happens to Netflix). Right now, they are taking tons of chances and it's hit/miss (which means some fantastic content for customers).
When you are on top, your strategy changes to what has worked. You don't want to lose market share, which means taking less chances. You aren't desperately trying to gain market share, you are now holding onto it. So, we might still see cool content, but it won't be as groundbreaking or as often.
I feel like this eventually gets watered down enough, and big money/advertisers get involved, and the cycle repeats.
I was an avid XM radio fan from the beginning. Many of the shock-jocks were allowed to say and do pretty much anything. After the big merger, it's now a shell of what it once was (the same strategy as the radio industry. If you compare the jocks of the 90s and today, it's a much different landscape).
I absolutely love the explosion of podcasts in the last couple of years. It has given people the complete freedom of speech and has pretty much replaced what I loved about satellite radio.
It reminds me why a free Internet is so important.
Im not sure how it is today but when I grew up in Finland in the 80s all the most popular tv-series for kids where in English only. Of the top of my head: The Transformers, Inspector Gadget, M.A.S.K., He-Man, G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, Care bears, Smurfs, Postman pat, DJ Kat show, and then non-cartoon shows like like MacGyver, Knight Rider, Airwolf, Quantum Leap, Rescue 911, etc.
We also watched some some non-English tv shows like the Swedish "Bjornes magasin" and the Finnish "Pikku Kakkonen". But these shows where not as cool and not as plentiful as those English tv shows.
Reminds me the episode from Quantum Leap http://bit.ly/15sofsv
Am I the only one who thought it was a summary of an unreleased Quantum Leap episode?
You remind me of a line from a TV show (I think an episode of "Quantum Leap") where a woman has just been dumped by her married lover (or something along those lines) and someone talks her out of committing suicide by telling her something to the effect that if she kills herself over him, that would just send him the message she "couldn't live without him" and feed his ego and is that really what she wants to "say" to him?