I never saw the show Sliders when it was on TV in the mid to late 90’s and I regret that.  This is the type of show that I would watch too.  Thankfully Hulu has it to watch from the very beginning, but only the first 3 seasons.

This show was in my Hulu queue and I was rushed to watch all 3 seasons because they were supposed to expire at midnight on August 31st but for some reason it’s still there so if you haven’t seen it, there is still a chance.

I looked for a description of the show but this is all I could find:

“A boy-genius and his comrades travel to different parallel universes, trying to find their way back home.”

That tells the premise of the show but is hardly a description.  I will elaborate.

Quinn Mallory invents sliding and he brings his college professor Maximilian Arturo and his co-worker at the computer store Wade Welles.  He makes the vortex so huge to make sure that all 3 of them can go through but what he doesn’t realize is that he made it too big because it ends up going out of the house and into the street and captures a car with Rembrandt “Crying Man” Brown in the vortex.

Before they leave, Quinn meets his doppelgänger from another dimension who solves the formula for sliding and before he could tell him something important, his vortex sucks him out back to his own world.  That thing he was supposed to tell him was that he should not try to open a vortex before the time is up, otherwise you won’t get back home to your own dimension, you’ll be lost forever.

In that first episode they slide to an dimension where the planet is frozen.  They have to get out of there in a hurry otherwise they will die but that means opening a portal before the time is up which puts them in a different dimension.  They are lost.

They travel to dimension after dimension trying to get back home but end up getting caught up in the drama of the world they slide to.  Every dimension they slide to is the same exact year but the world is never the exact same.  The country might have been taken over by the Germans or the Russians, or in some cases the dinosaurs never went extinct.  There was one episode where California was Texas and even though it was the same year where they still had big buildings and technology, it was the wild west.

In the middle of the 3rd season, Professor Arturo dies and is replaced with a female character.  I understand that Wade leaves the show and is replaced with Quinn’s brother in the 4th season.  I know that they are brothers in real life but they are also brothers in the show.  I’m not exactly sure because I haven’t seen it yet but I’m pretty sure it’s the brother he never had.  Literally, the brother his mother never had but his mother in another dimension.

I also found out that by the end of the 4th season his brother is gone and in the 5th season Jerry O’Connell was replaced by another actor and his brother is replaced by another slider who is a female.  The only person left in the show who was there from the very beginning is Rembrandt.

So I have had a lot of fun watching this show on Hulu.  I had my computer hooked up to the hdtv with an HDMI cable and was watching it with Hulu Desktop.  There are commercials, usually about 5 times in 1 hour and they play 2 commercials so you are interrupted for 1 minute but that is way less time than if you were watching it on tv.  I don’t mind the ads because some of them advertise shows that you can watch on Hulu and they give you a button to click to bookmark the show for later.

I guess Hulu isn’t going to put the 4th and 5th seasons in their website but I found out that Netflix does have them so at some point I’m going to start the Netflix trial so I can watch the final 2 seasons.  I’m looking forward to seeing him and his brother together but without Wade and the professor, it’s kind of depressing to continue to watch it.  And without Jerry O’Connell in the final season I’m not even sure if I want to see it but I still want to see how it is.

I like this show.  I don’t know the reason I never watched this show but when I finally was able to watch it, I didn’t because I hadn’t seen it from the beginning and I don’t like to pick up a show in the middle because I’ll always be lost when they talk about a story line or character they used to know who I never got to see.  So that’s why I never watched it later.  But I’m watching it now so better late than never.