Life On Mars – The ABC iteration

After a false start and a major overhaul,  ABC has finally rolled out their version of Life On Mars, and it has about as much life as, well, Mars.

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.