It's been a looong time since fans have had any new episodes of NBC's sci-fi series Quantum Leap to fawn over. Many shows air the series finale and have viewers hoping for more, but few such series have led audiences to hope for a revival / reboot for a full 28 years, which is how long the beloved series, which starred Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell, has been off the air. Over the decades, there have been several rumblings of reboots, none of which have come to fruition. But, now, Bakula has an exciting Quantum Leap update for fans.
The most recent hope of a Quantum Leap reboot began earlier this year, when it was announced that Scott Bakula would no longer be spending most of his working life as Special Agent Dwayne Pride on NCIS: New Orleans. That show wrapped on CBS in May, after seven seasons, and the actor revealed then that he "would wish whoever did it luck" if a reboot were to get off the ground finally. Recently, in a chat on the podcast Bob Saget's Here For You, Bakula was asked by the host how a Quantum Leap reboot would work, and he responded:
I think we are definitely living in the reboot era, as you're aware of. So I think there's very significant conversations about it right now going on. I don't know... I mean, I don’t know what it would be. I don’t know who would have it. The rights were a mess for years. I don’t know if they’re even sorted out now. That’s always been the biggest complication.
OK, the good news here seems to be that people are actively talking about bringing us new Quantum Leap again, so there's a possibility that something might happen, though Bakula doesn't know where such a project would end up or whether or not it would be a movie, miniseries, potential full series, or what. While this is lovely, we should all pump our breaks a bit before getting too excited about the possibility.
As noted earlier, we have been here before with the idea of the 1989-1993 classic time travel series returning to our screens for new adventures. There was talk of a theatrically released film in 2009, with show creator Donald P. Bellisario (who also created the original NCIS) saying he'd completed a script for said movie many years later, in 2017. Obviously, nothing became of that script, and whatever "conversations" are happening now may or may not be taking ideas from it to create something new for Quantum Leap fans.
With regards to Bakula's suggestion that there were rights issues that kept the show from coming back sooner, all I could find were problems with the large amounts of classic music used in the series, that had to be removed / changed for home video versions, and that wouldn't lead to a problem for any new film or show.
Of course, people will want to know who might be shepherding more Quantum Leap to us, and how the new idea would work, and when Bellisario was brought up, Bakula said:
And Don, for years, he and I would talk about it periodically. He would always say, ‘I can’t write it without thinking about you and Dean [Stockwell].’ I said, ‘Just think about me and Dean and write your show. Get it out there. If you have an idea, just write it. I am sure it'll be great.' . . . People ask that question all the time. I don't know. I don't know what that idea would be if we did.
Basically, this means that we likely have a long way to go until we know whether or not the storyline of the original would continue with a potential new Quantum Leap in some fashion, or if it would be a total reboot. All we can do is continue to wait and see what happens next.
