Vintage St. Pete: When ‘SeaQuest’ came to town

The “Inverted Pyramid” St. Pete Pier (1973-2015) earned its place in entertainment history July 4, 2006, when 16-year-old Taylor Swift performed a 20-minute set, as part of a free country music radio holiday event. One of the songs she played was “Tim McGraw,” which had just been released as her very first single. Nobody had heard of her.

Seventeen years later, Swift would sell out three consecutive nights at Raymond James Stadium.

The Pier, as it was commonly known, was for many years a centerpiece of downtown activity, and Hollywood responded to its unusual look, and location right on the bayfront, on more than one occasion.

Segments of the “sailboat regatta” in 1985’s Summer Rental were filmed on the pierhead, although the majority of that John Candy comedy was lensed in St. Pete Beach.

Little-remembered today is SeaQuest DSV, a science fiction TV series that aired on NBC between 1993 and 1996. With Steven Spielberg as executive producer, the show was an aquatic knock-off of Star Trek: The Next Generation with Jaws veteran Roy Scheider as the brilliant, compassionate captain, Nathan Hale Bridger.

In the far-in-the-future year 2018, Bridger and his crew lived aboard a giant submarine called a DSV (deep-submersible vehicle); their mission was to boldly go where mankind had not gone before: The far reaches of Earth’s oceans. The final frontier.

The first season of SeaQuest was shot in Los Angeles. In the spring of 1994, production shifted to Universal Studios in Orlando.

At the end of July – 30 years ago this week – the company came to St. Petersburg to start shooting exteriors for the first Season 2 episode.

The cross-country move was deemed necessary because the first season’s ratings were anemic. It couldn’t compete with Murder, She Wrote on CBS, or ABC’s Lois and Clark.

And at an estimated cost of $1.5 million per episode, producers needed a bankable return: Bigger ratings and more quality advertising. Spielberg’s name – and John Debney’s majestic, John Williams-esque theme song – weren’t going to carry it alone.

Production costs were much lower in Florida.

And network brass ordered up better writers, along with a younger supporting cast. “We’re not giving up on the genre,” NBC West Coast President Don Ohlmeyer told the press when the move was announced. “But the bottom line is, we didn’t deliver the goods this season.”

A third of the featured cast was either fired or replaced when they balked at moving to Florida.

Executive producer and showrunner David Burke, who’d grown up in Pinellas County, had pushed for the relocation. Burke reasoned that it made more sense to shoot the underwater scenes, island scenes and beach scenes in nature, rather than in sterile tanks and on soundstages. And to depict the actors on streets and in front of buildings that viewers might recognize from hundreds of shows and movies shot in California.

The interior sets were rebuilt at Universal Studios; the re-jiggered cast relocated to Florida.

Was the network convinced it could save the good ship SeaQuest from going under? At the same press event, NBC’s President of Entertainment Warren Littlefield joked publicly that out of sight meant out of mind. “If we can’t see it, basically it’ll go away,” he said.

Together at last: The Pier and the Florida Power building. In the show, this was called “Cape Quest.” Photo: Amblin Imaging.

The season’s first episode, Daggers, introduced an establishing “lock shot” of the Pier, reimagined via computer manipulation to look like the berth of the gargantuan submarine. A monorail runs the length of the Pier drive, connecting the V-shaped building to the “headquarters of The United Earth Oceans Organization” – the old Florida Power building on South 34th Street (later known as the Ceridian office park).

Scene open: Scheider/Bridger, wearing a leather jacket, roars past Pier vendors on a he-man Harley Davidson, and it’s there – on Spa Beach – that he encounters his junior science officer Lucas Wolenczak (played by 18-year-old teen idol Jonathan Brandis) and the rest of the crew, ready to begin anew after the first season’s disaster/cliffhanger ending.

A GELF revolt outside Eckerd College’s Galbraith Marine Science Laboratory.

In this episode, GELFs (“genetically-engineered life forms”) are kept in a prison-like colony on an island (“daggers” is a derogatory term for these not-quite-humans). The GELF prison is “portrayed” by Eckerd College’s Galbraith Marine Science Laboratory, with additions to the facade.

The GELFs revolt, chaos ensues, and the SeaQuest gang (including Darwin, the animatronic talking dolphin) rally to save the day.

Backstage, SeaQuest was experiencing another sort of chaos. A mutiny, in fact.

In September, Scheider was interviewed on the set by a reporter from the Orlando Sentinel. “It’s total, total childish trash,” he said. “I’m ashamed of it.”

He had already threatened to quit, he told her. He was developing an ulcer.

The move to Florida, he went on, was supposed to shake things up. “We were going to present human beings who had a life on land as well as on the boat,” Scheider said.

“We’ve had one script that has done that,” Scheider said. “The other shows are Saturday afternoon 4 o’clock junk for children. Just junk – old, tired, time-warp robot crap.”

The script for the episodeVapors was the one Scheider liked. Season 2, Episode 4 focuses on the mariners’ off-duty lives. Bridger even has a love scene, with the ship’s new doctor-slash-empath (played by Rosalind Allen). 

In the episode “Vapors”: Michael DeLuise and Brandis inside the St. Petersburg Coliseum.

For Vapors, the Pier was filmed again, and new cast members Peter and Michael DeLuise (both veterans of the Fox series 21 Jump Street) joined Brandis inside the St. Petersburg Coliseum, which became “Buddy’s Smoke House,” a sort of bar/hookah lounge. Dom DeLuise – the brothers’ father – guest-starred. 

Allen was filmed in and around the Vinoy pool.

Two other actors shot a brief scene in front of the painting The Discovery of America at the (original) Dali Museum. 

True to his promise, Burke brought the SeaQuest company to locations all over Florida. Many underwater sequences were shot at Weeki Wachee or Silver Springs.

“Meltdown”: Danger at Fort DeSoto!

The company was back in St. Pete in November, to film scenes for the episode Meltdown (involving a giant, prehistoric crocodile) at Fort DeSoto Park. Anson Williams of Happy Days fame directed; he would helm an additional six episodes during the third and final season.

Still, the ratings continued to decline; Scheider was apoplectic about the poor scripts and the sci-fi cheese. He asked to be released from his contract; it was agreed he would appear in just three of the 13 Season 3 episodes, for continuity’s sake.

So began another round of retooling.

Michael Ironside’s stern-but-kindhearted Captain Oliver Hudson replaced Scheider’s character as the young crew’s father figure. Bridger had retired, it was explained, “to conduct scientific research.”

In the first episode (Brave New World) the SeaQuest crew reappear on earth 10 years after “vanishing” at the end of the last season, with no knowledge of anything that came before; the series was retitled SeaQuest 2023. To add to the audience’s confusion, the ship had many new crew members, again.

This time, no one was buying. The 57^th and final episode of SeaQuest aired June 9, 1996.

“It’s not real,” Scheider had whined to the reporter. “It’s not even good fantasy. I mean Star Trek does this stuff much better than we can do it. To me the show is now 21 Jump Street meets Star Dreck.’”

All three seasons of SeaQuest are currently streaming on Peacock.