NBC’s new take on Quantum Leap, premiering this Monday at 10/9c, will see Ben Song (performed by Kevin Can F**okay Himself‘s Raymond Lee) leaping by means of time and house whereas serving to these in want.
Even although a new crop of characters anchor the story — apart from Herbert “Magic” Williams (Ernie Hudson), who appeared within the OG sequence within the Season 3 episode “The Leap Home, Part 2 (Vietnam)” — the present is a continuation reasonably than a full reboot. For showrunner Martin Gero, the choice to add to the story as an alternative of redoing all the pieces was a no brainer.
“Everyone felt like the original show was so iconic, it would be crazy to cast a new Sam and a new Al (originally played by the late Dean Stockwell) and just start again,” he tells TVLine. “We would never be able to recapture the magic of those two characters, so to be able to do something totally new but in the same space — creating as a sequel more than a reboot — that just made sense to the entire creative team.”
The present facilities round Ben, whose unexplained leap within the Quantum Leap accelerator mirrors that of his predecessor Sam Beckett (performed within the authentic sequence by Scott Bakula). Sam by no means made it again dwelling, and now Ben faces a related dilemma.
“Ben is [Sam’s] spiritual successor,” Raymond Lee, who performs Ben, explains. “He must have seen what Sam Beckett did and the algorithm that he wrote and got really excited about the fact that [Sam] was able to step into the accelerator and make a leap, and [Ben] was probably inspired by that. And at some point, he joined the project to get involved with something of that nature.”
Ben’s surprising leap leaves the remainder of his staff scrambling to work out why he did it and the way to carry him dwelling. That crew contains Magic, the venture chief; Addison (Caitlin Bassett), an Army vet who seems as a hologram solely Ben can see and listen to; Ian Wright (Cowboy Bebop’s Mason Alexander Park), who runs the Artificial Intelligence unit “Ziggy”; and Jenn Chou (Bosch’s Nanrisa Lee), who heads up digital safety.
According to Lee, the NBC revival’s inclusion of a entire staff supporting Ben permits the viewers to “understand the inner workings of how these leaps were put together and [what] it takes for these leaps to happen and the kind of politics that are at play that are outside of it,” which is one thing we by no means noticed within the authentic present.
Another main change was centering the sequence round a romance as an alternative of a friendship, as seen within the authentic sequence between Sam and his holographic co-pilot Al. Now Ben is accompanied on his leaps by his fiancée Addison, in hologram type.
“Al and Sam, they had an incredible chemistry — [a] bromance for the ages — and we’d be silly to try to recreate something like that,” Lee notes. “Also, it’s a different time. Buddy comedies are great, but why not see a romance instead of a bromance? I think this is a great opportunity to dive into different dynamics of what these leaps can feel like, especially if there’s more at stake than just a friendship.”
Of Quantum Leap’s major romance, Gero provides, “It’s just a really neat twist on what is ultimately the worst long-distance relationship, like truly different time zones in a way that I don’t think anyone has experienced.”
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