Former test pilot Sam Beckett finds himself trapped in time due to an experiment gone awry, leaping into the body of a different person each week. Al Calavicci, at first known only as The Observer, is Sam's holographic adviser -- he provides Sam with some details about his new identity and gives him guidance on how to help the people affected by his presence. But Al never gives Sam all the info he needs, forcing our hero to bluff his way through many a wacky situation.
Scott Bakula, in the role that made him a star, plays Sam Beckett, a scientist who's part of a time-travel experiment that "went a little... ka-ka." Unable to return to his own time, and aided only by Al (Dean Stockwell, whose rapport with Bakula is one of the series' most appealing elements), his cigar-smoking, peculiar-dressing, sex-obsessed, holographic "enabler," Sam "leaps" unpredictably from one time period and person to another, usually completely out of his element (as a pilot, a boxer, a cowboy, an English lit professor, even an elderly black man in segregated '50s Alabama) and always in a situation that needs to be "made right" before he can leap onward. Generous helpings of humor, drama, physical action, and sentimentality (this is TV, after all) keep things moving, as do references to many other classic films and genres (Driving Miss Daisy in "The Color of Truth," Casablanca in "Play it Again, Seymour," boxing in general in "The Right Hand of God") and what creator Donald Bellisario calls the occasional "kiss with history" (Sam crosses paths with the young Buddy Holly and Michael Jackson, among others). It doesn't all work, as Quantum Leap occasionally becomes too cute and facile for its own good.
Cast and Characters
Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett/John Beckett
Dean Stockwell as Al Calavicci ("The Observer")
Deborah Pratt as Narrator/Ziggy
Dennis Wolfberg as Gooshie
Broadcast History First Telecast: March 26, 1989 Last Telecast: May 5, 1993 Number of Episodes: 96
Number of Seasons: 5
Original Network: NBC
March 1989, NBC, Sunday 9:00-11:00pm
March 1989- April 1989, NBC, Friday 9:00-10:00pm
May 1989, NBC, Wednesday 10:00-11:00pm
September 1989- August 1990, NBC, Wednesday 10:00-11:00pm
August 1990- January 1991, NBC, Friday 8:00-9:00pm
March 1991- July 1992, NBC, Wednesday 10:00-11:00pm
Former test pilot Sam Beckett finds himself trapped in time due to an experiment gone awry, leaping into the body of a different person each week. Al Calavicci, at first known only as The Observer, is Sam's holographic adviser -- he provides Sam with some details about his new identity and gives him guidance on how to help the people affected by his presence. But Al never gives Sam all the info he needs, forcing our hero to bluff his way through many a wacky situation.
