Socially conscious TV done right: why Dean Stockwell’s Quantum Leap was ahead of its time

These were the first words from Dr Sam Beckett every time he “leaped” into a new body, a new time and place, and a new potentially fatal or – even worse – socially awkward scenario: as a pilot at the controls of a nose-diving aeroplane; a soldier mid-firefight in the jungles of Vietnam; swinging upside down in a trapeze act; an actor on stage who doesn’t know his lines; a male stripper being ravaged by over-excited ladies; and locked in the throes of many, many romantic trysts. “Oh boy.” Oh boy indeed.

That was the hook of Quantum Leap, which first leapt onto TV screens in March 1989 and ran for five seasons, until 1993: you never knew where, when, or into whom Dr Sam Beckett would leap next.

Sometime during the futuristic, neon-lit Nineties, a time travel experiment goes “a little kaka” and unseen forces – vaguely described as “God or time or something” – intervene and send Sam (Scott Bakula) leaping around the years of his own lifetime.

With each leap Sam takes the place of somebody else from history, usually an everyman, everywoman, or in one case every–erm–chimp (though he occasionally gets to be a bonafide historical figure such as Elvis or Lee Harvey Oswald).

With the help of the cigar-tooting Al (Dean Stockwell, who has died aged 85), a hologram projected from the future, Sam must “put right what once went wrong” before he can leap again, always hoping that his next leap will be the leap home. With a righteous sense of compassion and social justice, Quantum Leap was woke before woke-ness was even a thing.

Created by Donald P. Bellisario (whose CV also boasts Magnum P.I., Airwolf, and NCIS), Quantum Leap was developed along with Deborah Pratt, Bellisario’s then-wife and producing partner, also an actress and science-fiction novelist.

“Don wanted to do a show about time travel,” says Deborah, who was both a writer and executive producer on the series.

“I’d been reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, and I brought this idea of quantum leaping to Don – the idea that you could be in two places at once – and said, ‘What if we did a show where he would step into the lives of other characters?’ Because time and space is limited. According to Einstein you can’t just be a third person in the past of the future – you’d have to replace something or someone.”

Loosely based on the theoretical science of string theory, the basic idea is that the beginning and end points of Sam’s lifetime are looped together, then that loop scrunched together like a ball of string so all points in time are touching, allowing him to leap between them.

Less of an exact science, perhaps, is the natural chemistry between Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell, one of the great TV double acts.

Bakula’s Sam Beckett is a man of impeccable moral fibre, with all-American good looks and easy charm. Even in real life, Bakula seems to have been forever cast as one of TV’s nice guys – a residual aftereffect from all those years in the Leap Chamber.

Stockwell was a 40-year screen veteran by the time he took on the role of raspy womaniser Al. Armed with his multicoloured “handlink”, like a squawking Lego-made precursor to the smartphone, Al’s initial job was info-dumping the backstory. But the rhythm between Sam and Al’s relationship became the show’s beating heart.

“I remember my audition notes on Scott saying, ‘Wow sexy guy, but is he everyman enough?’” laughs Deborah Pratt. “Could he be all these different characters? But Don said he could absolutely see Scott in all these roles. I’d seen Scott on Broadway and he had this wonderful comedic energy but a really great sense of drama. He was so talented – he could sing, he could dance, he could play the guitar! The only one he had grief with was hanging upside down on his trapeze.

“Dean Stockwell had just done Blue Velvet and Married to The Mob. Everyone thought he was going to take a big leap back into film but he read the script and loved it. And when Dean and Scott got into the room together, there was this chemistry. Everyone fell in love with them.

"The energy of a show, once you’re on the set, has to come from the stars. If they’re bickering or don’t like each other it doesn’t work, and that just never happened.”

Deborah Pratt herself voiced the only other recurring character, Ziggy, a “hybrid computer” not mentioned by name until the series’ fourth season, whose job it was to figure out Sam’s mission each week.

“I never got paid for it, of course,” she says. “And now in its 13th year of syndication!” The rest of the cast was made up of an ever-changing line-up of guest stars, including established character actors such as Bruce McGill and Roddy McDowell and names-in-the-making such that included Teri Hatcher, Neil Patrick Harris and Joseph Gordon Levitt.

Sam’s time-travelling do-goodery mostly amounted to preventing accidents, talking jumpers down from buildings, getting innocent people off the hook, or stopping relationships from breaking up. Plus, some old fashioned action heroics, of course; putting right history’s wrongs does require the odd punch-up.

Sam also had plenty of what the producers called “kisses with history”. He accidentally invented Trivial Pursuit, taught Chubby Checker “The Twist”, inspired Stephen King’s books, gave Buddy Holly the name “Peggy Sue”, and strolled past the Watergate break-in. “Originally every show was supposed to have a ‘kiss with history’,” says Deborah. “They’re cute, they’re clever, but they’re tough to come up with.”

Some of those moments look naff now, but no US show runs for 97 episodes without jumping – well, leaping – the shark a few times. Not only did Sam become a chimpanzee in one episode, he and Al would swap later places as leaper and hologram, meet “evil leapers” – who travelled through time to, well, put wrong what once went right – and got involved with the JFK assassination, a plot inspired by the fact Don Bellisario had served in the army with the real Lee Harvey Oswald. There are also one too many episodes of Sam leaping back to fix problems from Al’s prolific past as a pilot/astronaut/love rat.

In the same way that Doctor Who disappeared up its own time hole, and The X-Files eventually got tangled in its own conspiracies, Quantum Leap was at its most interesting when it wasn’t engrossed in its own sense of continuity. Like other science-fiction shows, the less actual science-fiction the better – Quantum Leap was infinitely more powerful dealing with smaller scale human drama.

“Once you leaped in and leaped out, these were human stories” says Deborah Pratt. “And they were little period movies – the cars, the music, the locations, the costumes. It was a writer’s dream – one week I’d write a romantic comedy, the next week a courtroom drama, and the next week it was a horror film. I got to explore so many genres.”

In arguably its best episode, the third season opener ‘The Leap Home’, Sam leaps into himself as a 16-year-old, giving himself the chance to be with his family one last time in the 1960s mid-west. It’s a sweet, low-key all-American tale.

(In that episode Sam serenades his younger sister with an acoustic version of John Lennon’s Imagine, which the producers needed permission from Yoko One to use. “So we started these calls to track her down,” says Deborah. “She was in the Himalayas, and when we got to her she was a fan of the show. She said, ‘Yeah, sure.’”)

The concept of Sam oh boying his way through his own lifespan – mostly between the Fifties and Seventies – was originally devised for budgetary reasons. But it instils the show with a sense of nostalgia, with the music, style, and iconography that shaped 20th century Americana, and roots those small human stories in a broader context, playing against the backdrop of culturally and socially significant historical moments. (Eventually the rule was broken with a leap back to the American Civil War.)

In one of Quantum Leap’s earliest gems, 'The Color of Truth’, Sam leaps into a black man in 1950s Alabama, where he fights deep south segregation ahead of the civil rights movement; in ‘What Price Gloria?’, set in the pre-women’s lib 1961, he became a woman for the first time, and was sexually harassed by his/her boss; and in ‘Black on White on Fire’ he leaped into a young black doctor with a white girlfriend during the racially-charged Watts riots of 1965. Other bold moves saw Sam become a boy with Down’s syndrome and even a rape victim.

As an African American woman herself, it was originally Deborah Pratt’s idea to have Sam experience what it was like to be both black and female. “When I came up with the concept it was about walking in someone else’s shoes,” she recalls.

“I understood it from a whole different perspective because these were things I’d had to deal with – with sexual harassment in the workplace and racism when I was growing up. Those were stories I could bring to the table. I had a voice that came from my own personal experience and this was the perfect platform.

“I wrote 25 episodes and co-wrote another 15. But if you look at the arc of episodes I did they were race riots in Los Angeles, sexual harassment, civil rights. I used this to tell human stories about the people he leaped into. It made him more of a hero and let white America, and the world, experience what was happening in these historic moments of time. Some of these things happened a long time ago, but we were saying, ‘Let us let you feel what this felt like.’”

For a show that’s primarily about history, and forever dated by its own Nineties-ness (check out the charmingly ropey special effects and Al’s futuristic wardrobe: silver leather jacket, light-up neon accessories, and wince-inducing pastel zoot-suits) Quantum Leap is light years ahead of its time: racists see the error of their ways; male chauvinist pigs have the tables turned on them; bullies getting their comeuppance; criminals go to jail; and mixed-race couples are allowed to live and love prejudice-free.

In our modern world of snowflakes vs alt-righters, the world feels far less agreed on what’s right and wrong, or what’s socially progressive. The Doctor Who reboot was roundly criticised for its virtue signalling, most notably its episode about Rosa Parks. Actually, The Doctor has been championing social justice for centuries without complaint, which goes to show how divisive woke culture has become.

It’s hard to imagine a show like Quantum Leap in 2021 – about a white man who leaps into the bodies of black, female, or disabled characters and takes the credit for them changing history – without it being hauled over the coals for whitewashing or virtuous appropriation. But it’s probably unfair to criticise Quantum Leap in the context of its time; it’s a show that, like Dr Sam Beckett himself, feels wholly innocent and well-intentioned.

“I think that Quantum Leap could always work,” says Deborah. “It’s how you tell that story. One of the mandates was if you wrote an episode, it was your job to lay out both sides of the story, and respect the audience enough to make their own decision. We didn’t tell the audiences what to to think. We asked them, ‘What do you think?’ They were morality plays. The show would work today if people are willing to suspend disbelief and find hope.”

And it is surprising that Dr Beckett hasn’t leaped back onto screens since the show was cancelled in 1993, especially in this era when Hollywood and TV studios are plundering every name property available for the reboot treatment. Perhaps it's a blessing; one idea floated for the sixth season involved an animated sequence in which Sam became a baby.

And Sam is still out there, leaping around somewhere and sometime, after the show’s final sucker-punch reveal: Dr Sam Beckett never made it home.

“That was my fault,” laughs Deborah. “Don wanted him to go home. We had a huge fight about it. I said, ‘Are you out of your mind? If he goes home the show ends. If we leave him out there, putting right what once went wrong, there’s hope, we leave hope out in the world.”

If Sam was to finally make the leap to the present day, there’d surely be just one thing to say. Oh boy.