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The Show:
Often when hit British TV shows are brought to the US,
they fail
miserably and deserve to. (Anyone
remember the Fawlty Towers
take off staring Bea
Arthur?) Of course there are the
exceptions, like The Office, but
generally they're a pale imitation of the original.
That's why I approached The US version of
Life on Mars with mixed feelings. I
really enjoyed the first season of the UK version, and I was
afraid that
ABC's version would strip away everything that was good about the
original and
create a run of the mill cop show. For
the most part I was wrong. Yes, they did
dumb down the show for American audiences, and there were some
horrendous
episodes, but overall it was faithful to the original and boasted a
fantastic
cast. Unfortunately the show only lasted
a single season, which is now available on DVD.
Sam Tyler (Jason O'Mara) is a detective in New York City. He's
on the track of a serial killer, one who
has just abducted his female partner and girl friend Maya (Lisa Bonet),
and is
desperate to find a lead. Angry and
impatient for a breakthrough he pulls his car over to the side of the
road,
gets out for some fresh air, and is hit by a car.
He wakes up some time later, but not in a hospital, or even
on the side of the street. He's in an
empty lot where they're just starting to break ground for a new
expressway. He hasn't moved physically,
but the year is now 1973. Dressed in
clothes of the time, he finds papers (along with a car that's
apparently his)
with his name and rank on them saying that he's been transferred from
Hyde to
the NYPD precinct where he had been working in 2008.
Once there he finds that things were quite different back in
the 70's. When they find a fingerprint
at a murder scene he's told that forensics will have the report back in
two
weeks... if they can find a match since the database has to be searched
by
hand. DNA analysis and many crime scene
techniques that are routine today are unheard of back in '73.
Not only are the investigative methods different, so is
standard operating procedure. When Sam's
boss thinks he's found the perpetrator to a crime, he beats him until
he
confesses and if that doesn't work he has a stash of drugs hidden away
that he
uses as plants. Sam is aghast at these
techniques and fights them every step of the way, which makes him
unpopular
with his fellow detectives, to say the least.
That's the least of Sam's worries however. He
desperately wants to get back to 2008 and
reality seems to be fracturing in the time frame that he finds himself. He turns on the TV to hear doctors talking
about his case, saying that he's in a coma and might not pull through. He sees strange things too, like a kid
wearing a t-shirt with the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind on the front. He sees small robots that look like luna
landers occasionally and sometimes they come crawling out of this nose
or
ears. Other times people say things to
him that only he hears, messages about getting back home, and to be
paitent.
He confides in the only female officer in the precinct, Annie
Norris (Gretchen Mol) affectionately known as "No Nuts Norris" to the
other
detectives. Sam quickly learns to keep
his mouth shut around the other detectives though, especially his tough
as
nails boss Lieutenant Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel). Slowly
though, the other detectives, Ray
Carling (Michael Imperioli) and Chris Skelton (Jonathan Murphy), learn
that Tyler
knows what he's
doing and grudgingly accept the odd outsider.
The show gets a lot of things right. Of
course it helps that they had the UK show to work
off of (several of the first 4 or 5 episodes are remakes of the
original, but
after that this series strikes off on its own) but they still made to
make some
really good TV. There's a great scene in
the first episode after Sam wakes up in 1973.
He's walking through the streets gawking at the oddly dressed
people and
antique (to him) cars when suddenly he stops as if someone hit him in
the
stomach. He stares off into the distance
with a mixture of disbelief and horror.
Eventually the camera switches to what he's seeing:
the Twin
Towers dominating in the New York sky
line.
The casting is superb.
No one plays a rough guy with a heart of gold as good as Harvey
Keitel,
and he's fantastic in this show. If
anything he's a bit too good because he steals all the scenes he shares
with Jason
O'Mara. His gruff exterior hides and
even rougher interior and he play the role to perfection.
Michael Imperioli is also very good and
manages to break away from the Sopranos mold quite well.
Wearing outrageous sideburns and a horrendous
mustachio he's the junior detective who sees everything in black and
white and
has a huge chip on his sholder.
The only member of the cast who really does fit in well is Gretchen
Mol. She plays her character with too
much cheer and gestures too often.
Practically every time she talks her hands are waiving around to
emphasize her point. I never thought of
her as a cop, more like a department mascot.
It's little wonder the detectives didn't take her seriously.
The soundtrack to the show is excellent also. They
get off to a very rough start in the
first few episodes (they play the bubble gum song Little
Willy by Sweet when chasing a murderer *ugh*) but soon start
finding classic 70's songs that both fit the tone and mood of the
episode and
also tie into it with the lyrics. One of
the better soundtracks to a TV show that I've heard lately.
Most of the shows are stand alone police-procedural
detective stories that are both interesting from a mystery point of
view and
also just to see how things were done in the not too distant past. They tie in the mystery of what happened to
Sam by having him encounter his mother, father, and even himself when
he was 4. This aspect keeps the show
unique and propels
the main mystery while not interrupting the cop show aspect either.
Most of the episodes are very good, but the show is marred
by a handful of exceedingly contrived and stupid installments. One involves a murdered stewardess who
happens to be the exact double of Norris.
So close in fact that she takes the dead girl's place and her
roommates
don't notice the difference. Then her
bosses send her to a sex party. Yeah
right.
Spoiler Warning: The rest
of this review contains details
about the end of an episode and the series itself.
If you'd prefer that the mystery wasn't
spoiled, skip down to the technical section.
The penultimate episode is where the show jumps the shark
however. It's one of the worst episodes
in a good series that I've ever seen.
(And that's saying a lot.) It's
told in a round about fashion so that you don't have all of the pieces
at once,
but when you do it's totally idiotic.
After the leader of a local gang, McManus, shot two police
officers the rest of the unit is pounding the streets looking for him. (That includes one of the cops who was shot
in the torso. Apparently that's not a
serious would since twice in the series men have walked out of the
hospital
hours after being treated and had no side effects whatsoever. They don't even seem to be in pain.) At three in the morning, Sam finds the
scumbag (while no one else in the city can) and shoots him in cold
blood. (This is the guy who says that
people should
do everything by the book remember.) The
only thing is that he's out of bullets (why?) so an FBI agent, Frank
Morgan,
who just happens to be standing behind Sam shoots the scumbag. (Whew!
Good thing he was there.
Apparently everyone knew where this guy was!)
But Holy plot twist Batman - Sam then suffers
from unexplained amnesia! (He doesn't
even get hit on the head... it just happens.)
He wakes up in bed the next morning thinking that he was playing
checkers until dawn with his hippy neighbor and goes to work. When they find the body of the gangster, Sam
even suggests that Hunt was the killer.
Okay, so Frank Morgan shows up to investigate for the
FBI. Being a criminal mastermind (he
killed the McManus because he was afraid the crook would finger him if
caught)
Morgan really, really wants the police to looking the murder he
committed. Not only is he confident, but
apparently he's
not worried about Sam saying "Hey, that's the guy that did it! I was standing there when he pulled the
trigger." Good thing he had amnesia.
Morgan decides to frame Tyler
and hires an actor to give a false
statement to the police and ID's Sam as the shooter.
I know actors aren't supposed to be smart,
but come on. Surely he'd know that lying
to the police, and framing one of their own would get him in really,
really,
big trouble. (Was he going to testify in
court too? Didn't he think someone would
find out he wasn't really the doctor that he was posing as?) So then Frank tosses Sam's apartment and
plants the murder weapon there. When
confronted Sam goes to his hippy neighbor's apartment and finds it is
totally
empty. Not only is she not there, but
neither are there any furnishings, food, clothes, or even a rug. Everyone thinks she's just a figment of his
imagination, but it turns out her ex-boyfriend needed some money so he
stole
everything and she hadn't had time to buy anything else.
Or report it to her policeman neighbor.
So Sam get locked up, Hunt gives him a key to his cell and
so Tyler
walks
out of the station. He roughs up one of
McManus' men and finds out that the mobster was afraid of someone
connected to
a certain toy company. He goes and
checks out their offices and discovers that a launch party for their
newest toy
is underway and the bartender is none other than the 'doctor' who ID'ed
him as
the killer. Imagine the odds that the
same actor would be at the party just as Sam arrived!
But Morgan is there too. His
spider-sense must have cued him in that
Sam was going to the toy company because there's no other reason for
him to be
there. Anyway, instead of shooting him
(Sam is an escaped prisoner and did have a gun at the time... a Fed could
surely
talk himself out of that one) he decides to take Sam up to the roof and
make
him jump. Morgan then talks to him for
just long enough for the rest of his squad to show up and save the day.
The only thing worse than that is the final ending to the
series. Even the creators realized it
was horrid since they semi-apologize for it in one of the extras. They admit that half of the audience won't
like it, but then people don't like endings in general.
What?
People don't like endings? I
think they've confused that with the fact that people don't like BAD
endings. I won't give it totally away, but
I'd advise
you to just stop when there's about ten minutes left in the last
episode. The
series plays better that way.
The DVD:
The 17 episodes that make up this series come on four DVDs
which are housed in a single-width case.
There are two overlapping discs on each side.
Audio:
The DD 5.1 audio was very good, especially for a TV show.
The classic rock tunes filled the room when
the appeared and the dynamic range was excellent. These
sounded a lot better than they did when
I first heard them from the single tiny speaker on my transistor radio
(naturally). The dialog was also clean
and clear and the audio effects never overpowered the rest of the
soundtrack. A very solid sounding
show.
Video:
Like the audio, the 1.78:1 anamorphic image was very
good. In the first episode when Sam
arrives in 1973 everything was oddly tinted, like it was shot through a
very
light yellow filter. This was a
directorial choice and while it made part of the show look bad, like a
slightly
faded color show from the 70's, it's understandable why they did that. Luckily it only last for a short while and
the rest of the show looks great. The
detail is nice and the colors are properly saturated.
There weren't any digital defects worth
noting.
Extras:
This set has a good amount of extra material, especially for
a show that only lasted 17 episdoes. First
off there are commentary tracks to four episodes sprinkled through the
series: Out Here in the Fields,
The
Man Who Sold the World, Things to Do in New York When You Think You're
Dead,
and the series finale Life is a Rock.
The last one was quite interesting, with the
creators discussing the ending of the show (defending it for the most
part) and
talking about the hints that had been sprinkled through the show. Of course there were a lot of false clues
that are just dismissed out of hand, which makes the ending less than
satisfying. If the red herrings aren't
explained away, what is the point of providing hints.
To Mars and Back
is a 15 minute behind-the-scenes look at the show.
The cast and crew talk about the setting and
the challenges of shooting a show set in 1973.
For those who want another look at what filming the series is
like,
there is Sunrise
to Sunset with Jason O'Mara. This
condenses a day in the life of the lead character into about 10 minutes. They show him doing stunts, filming scenes,
etc.
Flashback: Lee Majors
Goes to Mars brings the star of The Six Million Dollar Man (a
popular
series back in the 70's) to the set of Life
on Mars. Okay. Ummm,
yeah.
The bonus section is wrapped up with 10 deleted scenes,
which are nice to see but don't really add much to the series, and a
short gag
reel.
Final Thoughts:
While this wasn't as good as the British series of the same
name, it was an interesting show that deserved to last longer than a
single
season. There were a couple really dumb
episodes,
and the series finale leaves a lot to be desired but even taking that
into
account it was a very good show. Add the
great image and audio quality and ample extras and it's easy to recommend this set.
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