VARIETY: August 20, 2009
FOX Slides Back into Sci-Fi With Tormé, Landis, Martin
Even for a successful Hollywood writer and director, sometimes the project of a lifetime seems to take a lifetime to arrive. "Tracy [Tormé] and George [R.R. Martin] worked on that Twilight Zone remake in 1985," director John Landis explains, "and since Tracy was a comedy writer, I poached him to help polish up Spies Like Us and Three Amigos. George wandered onto the set one day, and the three of us have been buddies ever since."
"I guess it was around 1991 that George and I were visiting my dad [singer Mel Tormé], and we were trying to out-do each other on movie concepts," Tracy Tormé recalls. "Who knows who started it, but we were stuck on the old sci-fi chestnut of parallel universes, which really hadn't been improved since Poul Anderson and Isaac Asimov. George says, 'and they can't find their way home.' And my dad, who thinks it's hilarious when we go off on these brainstorms, comes walking into the room crooning 'And what if you can't find your way home?' So yeah, we had the theme song before we even knew it was a TV show." The late Mel Tormé recorded the Sliders theme in 1993, when the first of many potential Sliders pilots fell through at the last minute.
"I hate the TV business, but I can't make myself leave," George R.R. Martin says with a hearty laugh. "It took us 16 years to get a network to bite on this thing. Everything that Tracy, John, or I did, all the success we've had, we'd keep coming back to this. We must have a 40-episode backlog by now, because every time we had a few spare hours, we'd start writing on it. In fact, 90% of the time, if you can remember a sequence from Dream On, or Tron:The Series, or Star Trek:Voyager that seems like it might be alternative history, that's because we were testing out Sliders ideas any way we could."
When FOX did green-light the show, they gave it their full weight. Sliders is getting a "killer slot" at 8pm Thursday, leading into Fringe. "It's the old Firefly slot, and we appreciate what that means to FOX," Landis says. The show also stars two of TV's most accomplished veterans: Alfonso Ribeiro, who acted in all 6 seasons of Fresh Prince and hosted the first 5 seasons of Dancing with the Stars; and Sabrina Lloyd, who spent all 5 seasons on Sports Night and just finished her 6-season run as the show-stealing Frankie on Ed. "The world knows and loves Alfonso and Sabrina. But I think we really scored some coups locking in George Newbern, who's a veteran on sci-fi sets, and Madeline [Blue] and Malcolm [David Kelley], who are more than just pretty faces -- they're some of the best young actors I've seen in years," Landis enthuses.