QUANTUM LEAP: Martin Gero and Dean Georgaris Preview Ben’s Leap to the LA Riots—With Magic

On the Wednesday, November 1 episode of QUANTUM LEAP, Ben (Raymond Lee) leaps into a teen who immediately finds himself entangled in the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

“It was an incredibly important time for Los Angeles [and] the show is set in Los Angeles,” QUANTUM LEAP co-showrunner Martin Gero tells Give Me My Remote, praising the Benjamin Raab and Deric A. Hughes-penned script. “Also, for us, having a Korean lead on the show [in Lee], we wanted to be able to tell stories about the Korean American diaspora that haven’t necessarily been on network television. So to be able to tell this part of it, this small part of the riots, was important. The show is always looking for new, fertile territory that we can explore, pieces of history that people feel like they know intimately, that they don’t know all of.”

“It was just it was also a chance to give our fantastic leading man, Raymond Lee, an opportunity to play something he experienced,” co-showrunner Dean Georgaris adds. “Not exactly the way he experienced, but [he’s] from Los Angeles. The strip mall in which his mom owned [a business] suffered a lot of damage. His life was directly impacted by this event. I think it felt very important to all of us and important to him…[and] Ben and Deric just did such a masterful job of handling a very complicated topic and doing it with a QUANTUM LEAP touch.”

As Ben is navigating a precarious situation in 1992, he’ll have a new face helping him along. In the aftermath of Ben and Addison (Caitlin Bassett) opting to not work together, Magic (Ernie Hudson) joins Ben on this leap.

“It’s great to have other people in there,” Gero says. “Obviously, we love Caitlin so much, but it really triples the amount of time people have to spend with those characters when they’re inside the chamber. And so to be able to get a little insight into what Magic has been going [through], the trouble Magic has been dealing with in the three years since we’ve seen him…It would be hard to do in a present day storyline. You want the space and also you want him talking with Ben, to a certain extent.”

“It was kind of a great convenience of the emotional turmoil that’s between Ben and Addison, that it allows us to get these other characters in the chamber a little more,” he continues. “[We] explore their characters in a greater depth, which I think everyone’s excited about.”

But will this be a short-term or long-term shakeup for the team? Gero is mostly keeping mum on that. “We’re doing it more than we did in the first season,” he says with a laugh.

QUANTUM LEAP, Wednesdays, 8/7c, NBC

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