What TV Scandal Did NBC Forbid Quantum Leap to Feature on the Series?

CBR

By Brian Cronin

Published Nov 11, 2019

In the latest TV Legends Revealed, find out which TV scandal that NBC banned Quantum Leap from using as the basis of an episode of the series.

TV URBAN LEGEND: Quantum Leap was forbidden to do an episode about the TV quiz show scandals of the 1950s.

Quantum Leap was a critically acclaimed television drama that aired from 1989-1993 on NBC that starred Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett, a scientist who cracked the secret to time travel, but found himself leaping from year to year without control over where he would leap next (he would displace an actual person from the time period every time he leaped). The only thing he could do was hope that eventually he would leap back to his time period. He figured out that the way to trigger another leap was to fix something that had gone wrong in the life of the person he leaped into. He was aided on his quest by his colleague, Al, who used a super-computer to calculate the best bet for what Sam was meant to fix during each leap (as I recently noted in a tweet, Al sometimes had WAAAAAY too much information available to him about the lives involved in the leaps). Al appeared to Sam as a hologram that only he could see and hear.

The show addressed a number of controversial topics over the years, but there were a few topics that NBC ruled off limits for the series. Some of them were logistical issues, where the show just didn't have the budget to get a topic done right. Others, though, were just too sensitive for NBC and they forbade the show from doing episodes on the topic.

On the Quantum Leap podcast, David Campiti, the creator of Innovation Comics, who did licensed Quantum Leap comic books, explained that he was given the Series Bible when he got the license and saw that one of the things that the show could not touch was the quiz show scandal of the 1950s.

The quiz show scandal was when a number of popular game shows of the 1950s were revealed to have been rigging their results to get the most interesting winners, with the NBC series, Twenty-One, specifically rigging things for a popular contestant named Charles Van Doren....

This was a dark time for television and things got so bad that the government nearly stepped in and took over control of broadcast television outright, but luckily, things didn't go that route. However, game shows have been ruled by very strict rules ever since (which is why some competition reality shows like Big Brother make it clear that they are NOT game shows, so that they don't have to play by the strict game show rules established in the wake of the quiz show scandal).

Of course, since Campiti was not restricted by the rules of the television series, he quickly had a Quantum Leap issue be about the quiz show scandal..