See Raymond Lee As The Replacement For Scott Bakula In The Quantum Leap Reboot
The Quantum Leap reboot has been greenlit by NBC for a full season, and we have the first loop at its new time-traveling star.
The Quantum Leap reboot is officially a go. NBC has greenlit the revival of the cult Scott Bakula science fiction/fantasy/time travel show, and we have gotten our first look at the new star of the show. Raymond Lee will be portraying Dr. Ben Seong, a modern-day scientist who restarts the Quantum Leap project initiated by Bakula’s Dr. Sam Beckett (hm, not unlike the producers behind the Quantum Leap reboot…) and gets knocked back in time with a touch of amnesia. Here is the image of Lee that NBC has released:
It seems that Dr. Ben Seong has been treated a little roughly by the Quantum Leap reboot so far. In the picture, Raymond Lee looks a bit sweaty and dazed and has a five o’clock shadow going on. Not having seen how the scientist looks when he is not being transported through time and space to fix what once went wrong, we can assume that Dr. Ben Seong does not always look so handsomely disoriented. He also appears to be wearing a Members Only jacket, the iconic 1980s jacket favored by people who don’t mind being instantly out of fashion in a few years.
Reportedly, the Quantum Leap reboot will involve Raymond Lee as Dr. Ben Seong being transported back to the 1980s having lost some memories of how he got there or why. This is in slight contrast to the original series, in which Scott Bakula’s Dr. Sam Beckett was transported (or leaped in a quantum fashion) to different places and times in nearly every episode. In that version, he would generally “leap” into the body of someone from that time period; while he would look like the ruggedly handsome Scott Bakula we know and love to himself, everyone else would see him as the person he was inhabiting. Typically, an episode would then involve Bakula figuring out what went wrong in the timeline and trying to fix it. Sometimes, it would get weird, like when he would leap into the body of a child or the time he became Lee Harvey Oswald and had to decide if he would shoot JFK.
NBC’s Quantum Leap reboot will involve Dr. Ben Seong restarting the abandoned project, so it is something of a soft reboot rather than a complete reimagining. This leaves the door open for Scott Bakula to reprise his role at some point, especially as the final episode of the original run of the show made it clear that Dr. Sam Beckett never actually made it back home and is presumably kicking out there in time and space somewhere. Sadly, original co-star Dean Stockwell, who played his holographic sidekick/exposition dump/cigar aficionado Admiral Al Calavicci, passed away in 2021, so if he appears, it will likely be only in reference or stock footage.
The Quantum Leap reboot will star Ernie Hudson in a seemingly analogous role, as Herbert “Magic” Williams, a Vietnam War veteran and presumably tough-talking mentor figure. Nanrisa Lee, Mason Alexander Park, and Caitlin Bassett have also all been cast as regulars on the series, apparently as other scientists working on the Quantum Leap project. The reboot is scheduled to premiere as part of NBC’s fall lineup.
