Jambalaya, jazz and a checklist of vaguely naval-related crime as long as Bourbon Street – NCIS: New Orleans might be the second city-specific franchise to launch from the NCIS mothership, but it’s already off to a flying start. More than 17 million viewers tuned in for the first episode when it premiered in the US last month, and Channel 5 has predictably snapped up the UK rights. It’s the mass-market hit set in the Big Easy that David Simon’s elliptical, soulful Treme could never be. Somewhere, Bunk from The Wire is playing a sad trombone.
Regional window dressing aside, NCIS: New Orleans doesn’t stray too far from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service blueprint. In the fine tradition of Mark Harmon and his increasingly Peaky Blinders undercut, there’s another middle-aged white dude in charge: the gumbo-fixin’, piano-playin’ Dwayne Pride, played by Scott Bakula. He may be a little crinklier than he was in his Quantum Leap heyday but Bakula is no less charming, leading a squad that includes Lucas Black, the kid from American Gothic all grown up, and the formidable CCH Pounder from The Shield.
In the interests of brand synergy, the first few episodes feature some Skype-assisted appearances from the original NCIS cast, including tweedy medical examiner David McCallum and goth lab queen Pauley Perrette. But the producers have orchestrated an even more mouthwatering cameo in time for Thanksgiving: Bakula’s old Quantum Leap sparring partner Dean Stockwell, rocking up as the father of a slippery local politician.
As unofficial TV reunions go, the prospect of seeing Doctor Sam Beckett and horndog hologram Al resume their antagonistic bromance is irresistible. Both actors have enjoyed wide-ranging careers since Quantum Leap’s fifth and final season wrapped up in 1993, but their paths have only crossed at sci-fi conventions, during the years when Bakula was commanding an early version of the USS Enterprise and Stockwell was starring as a memorably grumpy Cylon on Battlestar Galactica. (Quantum Leap is not currently available on Netflix UK, but SyFy are repeating the first season starting on Monday night.)
Reuniting Bakula and Stockwell on-screen is a fanboy in-joke, a headline-grabber and a salute to their fine work from more than two decades ago all rolled into one. But it’s also a little depressing, since NCIS: New Orleans is, to all intents and purposes, the anti-Quantum Leap. Despite its super-mellow theme song, Quantum Leap was ambitious, reckless, high-wire TV. It was a 20th-century period drama constantly set on shuffle – like making The Americans one week and Happy Days the next.
The central conceit of time-travelling do-gooder Sam jumping into a different person to put right what once went wrong was made literal in the production process. Every episode was, in the current fashionable lingo, a hard reboot, requiring a new supporting cast, new production design, new locations and a new plot. Quantum Leap was nominally sci-fi, but had the uncommon ability to riffle through genres. It could be a romance, a war story, an issues-based drama, a celebrity biopic or a knockabout comedy. The only threads of continuity came from Al’s weird, shiny future-suits and Sam’s unswerving morality. And, of course, his catchphrase. Bakula squeezed an astonishing variety of inflections out of just two words: “Oh boy.”
Viewed alongside Quantum Leap’s creative cavalcade, NCIS: New Orleans begins to look like particularly weak sauce, a spinoff of a spinoff, manufactured from a template created with mass production in mind. Its proven formula of forensics and shootouts can be easily repeated week in, week out and then shipped around the world – a product stamped with the NCIS logo in the same utilitarian manner as Dwayne Pride’s windbreaker.
So while I’m looking forward to seeing that old goat Stockwell, his NCIS cameo might feel less of a celebration and more a glimpse at the darkest Quantum Leap timeline, one where Sam ended up trapped in the body of a young federal agent but made the best of it by learning to make gumbo and play jazz piano.
Are you excited that Sam and Al are reuniting? What was your favourite Quantum Leap episode? Let us know in the comments below.
