Why ‘Organized Crime’ Is Moving to Peacock & Canceled ‘Quantum Leap’ Isn’t

NBCUniversal organized a move from NBC to Peacock for Law & Order: Organized Crime, but that’s one leap that Quantum Leap isn’t making.

Last month, Quantum Leap fans learned that NBC had canceled the sci-fi drama after two seasons, bringing Dr. Ben Song’s (Raymond Lee) time-traveling adventures to an end.

And last week, Organized Crime followers learned the Law & Order spinoff would be moving from NBC to Peacock for Season 5, meaning Detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) will be solving cases (and perhaps swearing up a storm) in streaming.

Now Jeff Bader, President of Program Planning Strategy at NBCUniversal Entertainment, has revealed why Quantum Leap didn’t get the Peacock treatment like its former network sibling.

“Organized Crime is a very successful show; this isn’t a show that was on the bubble,” Bader told TVLine in a new interview. “It’s a show that works across the board, and it’s very, very strong on streaming. [Moving Season 5 to Peacock] is a win-win for us — 80 percent of its viewing isn’t in the time period where we schedule it, it’s delayed on Peacock, so it just made sense to move that to free up the time period.”

But it’s a “different discussion with Quantum, which was just a much softer show, performance-wise,” Bader said.

Quantum Leap averaged 3 million viewers and a 0.4 demo rating in live-plus-seven-day viewing in its second season, down 23 percent and 34 percent from its first-season performance, TVLine notes. But Organized Crime averaged 5.3 million viewers and an 0.6 demo rating in Season 4, almost on a par with Season 3.

In Quantum Leap’s second-season finale — which is now, presumably, its series finale — ex-fiancée Addison (Caitlin Bassett) reunited with Ben in the past, suggesting that a third season would have had the once-engaged duo leaping through spacetime in tandem.

“The idea of two-person leaps is really exciting because you never know who they might leap into,” executive producer Dean Georgaris previously told us in a tease of third-season ideas. “They could leap into a cop and a robber who are in the same car for a reason, they can leap into gender swaps, one’s a mom and the other’s a kid,” he noted. “I don’t think it’s always going to go the way they expect. I don’t necessarily think just because they’re together in one leap means they’re automatically together in the next leap.”

Another question mark would have been the status of Ben and Addison’s relationship. “The idea is they’ve reconnected and they’ve rediscovered how much they care for each other, but they’re not a couple,” Georgaris added. “That’s another thing we’re really excited to explore is, now they’re together, but what are they and how are they going to make it work?”

Now we’ll never know, unless some other network or streaming service saves Quantum Leap. Or maybe, as with other canceled series, Season 3 will play out in the pages of a comic book…