The TV Guide articles

Time after Time

TV Guide, October 21, 1989
By Glenn Esterly
Transcription by Elaine Davenport

Scott Bakula is a new man--or woman-every week.
How long can he make such Quantum Leaps?

On a morning during his summer hiatus from Quantum Leap (NBC, Global), Scott Bakula-in his very own body-has survived a real-life crisis. With his wife running errands, Bakula was assigned to take his 5-year-old daughter to school-and other duties he isn't normally around for by virtue of putting in16-hour days on the set. But he left the front door of the house open, and the dog was outta there. "I tried to appear very calm and reassuring as I was driving my daughter about the neighborhood, looking for the dog," Bakula says. "'Oh, no problem, honey; he'll be right around the corner'."
At that point, Bakula wanted someone to inhabit his body-the way he inhabits the bodies of others in the time-travel series-someone who could just fix the problem. "Amazingly, the dog was retrieved. We made school on time. Everything turned out OK."
And things are finally turning out OK for Scott Bakula (pronounced as in Dracula) on the roller coaster of network television. As a versatile actor who made his Broadway debut as Joe DiMaggio in "Marilyn: An American Fable" and earned a 1988 Tony nomination for the Broadway musical "Romance, Romance, "Bakula had brief, upsetting experiences with his previous TV series. Taking over Michael Keaton's movie role as the manager in a car factory in ABC's spinoff Gung Ho, he not only was part of a ratings failure but part of an alleged racial affront to Japanese. Moving on to Eisenhower & Lutz (CBS) as an ambulance-chasing Palm Springs lawyer, Bakula liked playing the wrong-side-of-the-tracks manipulator, but that series also folded in a hurry.
Quantum Leap was renewed for this season despite being 52nd overall in the ratings last spring, saving Bakula the inglorious distinction of having a series canceled on each network in short order. NBC obviously thinks there's too much potential there to let it go, despite the fact that almost no one-including immensely successful executive producer and creator Donald Bellisario (co-creator of Magnum, P.I.)-can adequately explain the premise of the series to anyone who hasn't seen it. Brief attempt: It's the adventures of a young scientist, Sam Beckett (played by Bakula), whose flawed time-travel experiment keeps him bouncing through the '50s, '60s and '70s, taking on a variety of other people's identities. Meanwhile, an eccentric colleague (Dean Stockwell) tries to get him back to the present.
"The fun of the show to me," says Bakula, "is the fantasy of being somebody else. The 'grass is greener' idea. If you could be somebody else for a day, what would that be like? How would you respond? It's not serious science fiction. It's just supposed to make you end up feeling good."
So far, Bakula has been, among others, a test pilot, minor-league ballplayer, Mafia hit man, boxer, 70-year-old black man and a woman complete with high heels. "Size 11 pumps," says Bakula. "Dean gets to wear all these great modern clothes, and when I finally get some stuff from wardrobe it's for adwoman."
The series came out of the blue for Bakula, who at 34 was admittedly soured on network TV after his first two series crashed. In the meantime, he'd taken actress wife Krista Neumann and daughter Chelsy back to New York, where he sang and danced to acclaim in "Romance, Romance." Back in L.A., "I didn't know Don, I'd never worked for Universal, and I wasn't sure I wanted back into TV, but my agent said there was a script I should read. It turned out it was just two scenes, picking up on page 34 or so of the pilot script. I couldn't make any sense out of it, but I went over and read for Don."
Bellisario: "Most of the time in TV, you're lucky if you get 80 per cent of what you want in your star. For various reasons, you end up compromising on somebody because you can't do any better. It's particularly hard to find leading man between 30 and 35. When Scott read that morning, he blew me away. I know other producers feel obligated to say that about whomever they've hired, but this time I thought, 'If I can hire this guy, I'm going to get 100 percent.' Scott is simply enormously talented. You'd better be to play a new character every week."
"A lot of what Scott does must be instinctive ability," says Dean Stockwell, "because for a guy my age, he's just a kid in terms of experience. So he's got good instincts, and he's not afraid of hard work. One week, after about a12-hour day, he knew he was going to be playing the boxer in the next episode, so he put on the gloves and worked out on the punching bag for an hour and half-when he could have gone home. He just wanted that boxer to be as realistic as he could."
Bakula still has trouble thinking of himself as a leading man. "I'm certainly not a straight lead type," he says. "I fit in with Dean and Don's thinking, 'cause I'm always looking for something a little funny or quirky in the scripts, like they are. I could not get cast on a soap opera when I was starting out in New York-every time I read for one, the producers would laugh, but it was the kiss of death for what was supposed to be deadly serious." Bakula can't explain where his comic bent came from. He grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis, the son of an attorney, and had "a pretty easy, conventional life. I played sports, and my folks were musically inclined, so I started playing the piano very early and graduated to a rock band in fourth grade."
He was convinced he would become an attorney, too, but at the University of Kansas he lapsed into theatre arts-and the performing took. He was lucky as well as good. "When I went to New York, I got a job in three days with a road company doing 'Shenandoah'." That was followed by summer stock tours with Ed Ames, John Raitt and Kenny Marshall. When he made his Broadway debut in "Marilyn: An American Fable," he knew the show wouldn't last long, "but just opening on Broadway, the first night, is something beyond compare. The limos, the tuxes, the red carpet-it was great."
The show also produced one of his strangest reviews, he says. "Now this is a musical. And somebody on Channel 11 or some station slammed the production, saying, 'And can you believe it?-they had Joe DiMaggio singing. We all know Joe DiMaggio never sang in his life'." That compares for Bakula to a review of Quantum Leap that accused the show of breaking the rules of time travel. "Just what are those rules?" Bakula wonders, deadpan. "And do they vary from state to state, country to country, planet to planet? Is William Shatner going to come and arrest Don, Dean and me because we've violated several science fiction ordinances?"
"The only 'formula' for this show," says Bellisario, "is that we have Sam involved in heart-warming situations-whoever's body he's in-and that there be a 'kiss of history' aspect to it. In one show, for instance, Sam tells a kid [a Buddy Holly-type rocker] to call his song 'Peggy Sue,' not 'Piggy Sue.' In away, the time travel is just an excuse for us to bypass that dirty word 'anthology' in this business. Anthologies, with different characters every week, aren't supposed to work any more, so the time travel just serves to allows to do it through Sam's strange situation."
"When Don originally told the idea to Brandon Tartikoff [president of NBC], he prefaced it by saying, 'This is going to scare the hell out of you'," Bakula notes.
If Bakula gets scared by the prospect of inhabiting a new character every week, he doesn't show it. "I just kind of dive in," he says. "It's not as hard as it seems, because Sam doesn't become an entirely different persona. He has to blend into a new situation, but he's not supposed to be terribly familiar with the surroundings; to the extent I'm not familiar with them either, it makes it authentic. When the scene called for me to walk in high heels for the first time and fall off, that was no problem. I just naturally fell off, and they had the shot. It gets tricky when I need to show more realistic behavior: that woman being chased around a desk by her boss in 1961-pre-feminist movement. In those circumstances, even though the show is basically fun and fantasy, I don't want to go over the line in a way that's offensive."
Bakula was hurt by the ethnic-stereo-typing charges against Gung Ho. "I got really attached to the Japanese on Gung Ho," says Bakula. "I don't think they'd have been doing that show if they thought it was a put-down in any way." Although the emphasis remains primarily light on Quantum Leap, Bakula is pleased that his depiction of an elderly black man who had a minor contribution to the civil rights movement "is being used in a number of schools as a way for teachers to get their classes talking about prejudice and civil rights.
Obviously, this wasn't a PBS documentary or anything, but it's a bonus when an episode touches people like that. Letters were coming in from, say, sixth-grade history class teachers and students saying thanks. That seems incredible." In the meantime, in the sheer interests of mischief, the rule-breaking guys in front of the camera (Bakula and Stockwell) and the guy behind it (Bellisario) desperately want to get a certain former big TV star to agree to an episode in which Sam Beckett lands in that huge star's body. Since Sam is only seen in the other person's likeness when he looks in a mirror, all it would take from that major star is the OK to use a scene in which he's shaving or looking in a mirror for any reason from his old series, and there are plenty of those scenes. "We think it'd be hilarious," Bakula says.
Whaddaya say, TomSelleck?