The original is some of the best television you’ll never get to see. It’s the story of Sam Tyler, a tightly wound police detective who gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. There he comes face to face with  markedly different attitudes toward policework, feminism, popular culture, and civil rights. His primary foil in 1973 is DCI Gene Hunt, a leonine blowhard who doesn’t care for DI Tyler’s fancy modern methods at all. After all, “Gene Hunt smashes doors down. He does not pick girly locks.”

The BBC iteration felt bold and new. Sly cultural jokes deftly danced with moral dilemmas, manly camraderie, and engrossing mysteries. The American iteration feels like nothing at all. It suffers from a complete lack of distinction; the copy is  featureless Xerox, where all the engaging nuances are wiped out in the imperfect act of copying. It looks like television, it sounds like television, and at its best, it merely resembles routine television.

The good news about the American iteration is that it’s not the absymal failure the David E. Kelly version was rumored to be. The bad news is that it’s plodding and generic, unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. Jason O’Mara’s Detective Tyler is a loose-limbed vacancy. He doesn’t seem focussed enough to be a sitcom character, much less a brilliant police detective. Harvey Keitel  does a lounge-act Harvey Keitel impersonation as Chief Hunt. He comes across like a leprechaun with a mullet, or an incarnation of the Fighting Irish logo, all fists and sweat. The only actor to escape reasonably unscathed is Michael Imperioli, who appears to have entered the witness protection plan where he was promptly given the world’s most horrible mustache.

In 2008, Sam was hot on the tail of a serial killer who had just kidnapped his girlfriend Maya. In 1973, he immediately stumbles across a victim identical to the bodies the modern killer was leaving behind. One step at a time, Sam realizes how backward that 1973 is. A cell phone is unheard of. Fingerprints will take two weeks to get a match. And the World Trade Towers are still standing. Hey, weren’t those the days!

It’s unfair to compare this version to the original, but unfortunately on its own merits, it fails. The storytelling is flat and telegraphed. A wisecrack, a line of exposition, a beat of wondering at the wacky 1970′s; each moment follows another as a discrete packet, like a quantum of narrative, disassociated with the preceding beat. It’s thuddingly insistent on remaining a step behind the audience at all times.

At the end of the pilot, a killer is caught, and yet Sam remains mysteriously stuck in the past. The pilot episode follows the British pilot episode almost beat-for-beat, and yet never comes into a focus of its own. Every moment feels like a Xerox copy of something we’ve seen before – people who’ve never seen the original would feel a passing twinge of famliarity, as well, struggling to remember which generic cop show that they’ve stumbled across in late nights of channel surfing. The most successful British import, The Office, succeeded because the American producers took the broad strokes and re-tooled the show to fill in their own fine details.

If the American Life On Mars is going to succeed, it needs to find a unique identity, and fast. Until then, let’s console ourselves with some favorite Gene Hunt-isms:

Dora Keens: I want a lawyer.

Gene Hunt: I wanna hump Britt Eklund, what are we gonna do?

 

[Bursting in on Stephen Warren, who is performing an act of oral sex on another man]

Gene Hunt: I’m not a Catholic me’self Mr Warren, but isn’t there something in the Bible about “Thou shalt not suck off rent boys”?

Warren: How dare you come in here!

Gene Hunt: You could have said that to the boy.

 

Gene Hunt: There will never be a woman prime minister as long as I have a hole in my arse.

 

Gene Hunt: I think you’ve forgotten who you’re talking to.

Sam Tyler: An overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained, borderline-alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding?

Gene Hunt: You make that sound like a bad thing.

 

Gene Hunt: Don’t move, you are surrounded by armed bastards!

 

 Chris Skelton: I wonder what killed him?.

Gene Hunt: That would be the bloody enormous hole in his chest where the bullet went in.

 

Gene Hunt: Now. Yesterday’s shooting. The dealers are all so scared we’re more likely to get Helen Keller to talk. The Paki in a coma’s about as lively as Liberace’s dick when he’s looking at a naked woman, all in all this investigation’s going at the speed of a spastic in a magnet factory.

 

Sam Tyler: I still think we need to entertain the possibility that this could be a racial killing..

Gene Hunt: Oh, well let’s entertain it, let’s take it out for a prawn cocktail, a steak and a bottle of Liebfraumilch, then let’s kick it into the gutter where it belongs!

 

Gene Hunt: You great… soft… sissy… girlie… nancy… French… bender… Man United supporting POOF!

 

Gene Hunt: Drugs, eh? What’s the point. They make you forget, make you talk funny, make you see things that aren’t there. My old grandma got all of that for free when she had a stroke.

 

Gene Hunt: He’s got fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course.

 

Gene Hunt: She’s as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot.

 

 

The bad news is that ABC is prepping an Americanized version for the fall and it’s going to be awful. So it’s time to break radio silence. Find a torrent site, search Ebay for DVDs and buy a PAL DVD player, or scramble around online anywhere you can and download Life On Mars.

There’s only two 8 episode seasons of the British version, so it’ll be quick to pull down. If the powers that be won’t make it legally available – because they’re prepping a vastly inferior version – then civil disobedience to the IP laws of the land is the only option.

The premise of Life On Mars is simple. DI Sam Tyler (that’s Detective Inspector for us Yanks) is an obsessed, procedure loving detective chasing a serial killer in London in 2007. He gets hit by a car while investigating, and wakes up in 1973 as a junior detective working for the blustery DCI Gene Hunt. The opening credits ask the question – is he mad, in a coma, or has he really gone back in time?

It’s a simple gimmick, and the first episode plays out like a goof on the CSI procedurals. DI Tyler is used to extensive lab reports and forensic science tests. In 1973, it takes two weeks to match a fingerprint. Civil rights are an alien concept. Women and minorities can’t be taken seriously as detectives – even by themselves. And DCI Hunt is a garrulous English redneck, happy to beat a confession out of any poor sot in his interrogation room just so he can get to the pub by five.

What unfolds from there is some of the most engrossing television to have aired in years. Imagine Lost if it promised a satisfying resolution without jerking the audience around. Imagine Battlestar Galactica with a sense of humor. Imagine House playing out as a semi-surreal detective show.

Life On Mars is a deftly nuanced show. The overall questions of what is real or imagined never drown the police drama. The culture clash of 1973 and 2007 is deftly handled. The attention to period detail and cop shows from the 1970’s is immaculate. Only producing 16 episodes allowed the producers to craft an engaging mystery with a satisfying, but still slightly ambigous ending. And most impressively, all these elements are blended together to create something incredibly unique and satisfying.

If you’ve enjoyed any of the stellar BBC generated productions of the last decade (like The Office or Top Gear – which, incidentally, is my current pick for the best show on television), then tracking down Life On Mars in the original version is imperative. If you’re a fan of quality television, and can appreciate drama like The Wire or The Sopranos for their artistry, then Life On Mars is a must-see.

So when ABC announced that it had the rights to an American re-make, my heart sank. Then I saw the upfront presentation that ABC played for advertisers to drum up their excitement for the show, and I got ill. When that presentation missed the boat with their music cues, I got outraged. The title is derived from a David Bowie song with lyrics heavy on alienation, outrage, and larger than life movie images.

Wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show.
Is there life on Mars?

The ABC presentation keeps the title Life On Mars, but falls back on the goofy, populist disco of KC & The Sunshine Band. “Get Down Tonight” would be better served pushing the CBS fiasco Swingtown. The shiny, harmonious, and upbeat disco song is an entire world away from Bowie’s piercing wail and dissonant lyrics. Gone is the introspection and alienation, wiped away with a goofy 70’s cop show that resembles the Beastie Boys video for Sabotage.

When the news came down that two weeks ago, when other shows are up and running at full speed for the fall, they were re-casting and changing show runners, all hope was lost. Supposedly the whole cast is getting re-tooled except the lead actor. This obliterates the one glimmer of hope that the presentation showed – casting Star Trek: The Next Generation veteran Colm Meany as the boisterous Gene Hunt. In the BBC series, Philip Glenister was the incendiary star of the show, and one of the most indelible characters that any television series has seen. Colm Meany, aside from hailing from Wales, seemed to capture the leonine aggression of Glenister’s incomparable work. Now even that’s gone, as the thick-headed John O’Mara seems to be the only remaining element from the ABC presentation.

During the NBA finals, ABC is running promos for Life On Mars that are about as bad as promos can get. Now this is as thankless a promo assignment as it gets. Advertise a show where you can only show one cast member, using a song that’s completely inappropriate for the feel of the show. Watch for it on Tuesday’s game 6 and weep. Because they can only show Jason O’Mara, and since the new pilot is being shifted from LA to NYC, they can’t even show him in action, all you see is a mud colored shot of an indistinguished actor on a dull background.

TV promos don’t get worse than this. And TV series can’t go off the rails any worse than this. The original pilot presentation is available on the internet, but I won’t contaminate my site with any links to it. If I can find the ABC promo, I’ll provide a second-by-second breakdown of everything that’s horrible about it. And if you can find the original version of Life On Mars anywhere, go get it. It’ll be the best thing you do for yourself this summer.