Life on Mars
Thursday 10 PM, ABC
The Premise: In this adaptation of a BBC hit, Detective Sam Tyler finds himself stranded in 1973 after being hit by a car in 2008. We have a winner!
The Personnel: Harvey freaking Keitel! But I’m getting ahead of myself. The show is adapted by David E. Kelley, best known for creating and writing approximately one billion TV shows. Jason O’Mara, from a lot of series cancelled after one season, stars as Tyler. The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli, with facial hair that can only be described as glorious, plays one of Tyler’s fellow detectives. Perennial Next Big Thing Gretchen Mol plays a harassed policewoman, and the Lieutenant running the show is none other that one Mr. Harvey Keitel, in his series TV debut. Roll that one around in your mind. Harvel. Freaking. Keitel.
The Poop: I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of the BBC series, so I can’t adequately compare the two. (Dear BBC: Please stop making your season sets so damn expensive.) Standing on its own, however, Mars is really enjoyable.
The concept is clever enough on its own, but there’s some really good material to be mined from Tyler’s 35-year time displacement. No computer, no cell phone, no DNA evidence. Sexual harassment and police brutality run rampant, and a 21st century guy like Sam is hopelessly out of place.
What I like even more than the high concept is the modern take on 70’s cop shows. The shows at the time (at least the popular ones) tended to focus on car chases and shootouts, or shamelessly ripped off Dirty Harry. Cop shows changed forever after Hill Street Blues, which started to look at the police as people rather than badges and iconic personalities. Mars lets us see the machismo and the rule-bending common to that era through the eyes of a post-Wire detective. Lieutenant Hunt thinks nothing of planting LSD on a suspect, which doesn’t raise an eyebrow from anybody except the displaced Tyler.
Of course, the meta-plot is interesting to me as well. It’s not particularly important why Sam is displaced in time – I’d be willing to write it off as an unexplainable occurrence and go along with it. But Sam is, naturally enough, obsessed with his circumstances. In the first episode, voices from 2008 bleed through on TV and the radio, leading to the conclusion that Sam is in a coma. (He walks as far as he can, because, he reasons, if 1973 is in his mind, at some point he’ll run out of streets and people. “There are only so many details”.) The second episode, however, has Sam seeing what appears to be a highly advanced piece of surveillance equipment hiding in the bushes, which leads to a different conclusion altogether. In the BBC series, Sam heard the future voices, but they would indicate that Sam’s actions in the past caused changes to the present. I’m interested to see we’re they’re going with this, and if they continue to imply different explanations with each episode.
The cast is fantastic – Harvey Keitel has long been one of my favorite actors, and he fits the setting perfectly. I’m not familiar with Jason O’Mara, but he holds his own against one of the greats. (Sometimes I like to imagine a world where Keitel became the star after Mean Streets rather than Robert DeNiro. It is a better world than our own in all respects.) Mol and Imperioli have more than proven themselves by now, and deserve a showcase like this.
The Prognosis: Ladies and gentlemen, we have “Record All”! My one concern is that David E. Kelley tends to get preachy and/or cutesy, but for right now it’s an enjoyably scuzzy look at the 70’s. Plus, Harvey Keitel!
