Is there life on Mars?

Once upon a time, there was a little broadcasting company. We’ll call them the BBC, since that’s their name. And the BBC came up with a show called Life on Mars. The premise was simple: Sam Tyler, a police detective, gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1972. He has no idea whether he’s in a coma, dead, dreaming, or something in between.

Life on Mars is a show I put off watching for a long time. Friends of mine loved it, but as much as I love British culture and my heart belongs across the Atlantic, the fact remains that I don’t know much about the 1970s in Britain. I was afraid it would be culture shock, too much for me to handle. For that reason, and basically that reason alone, I put off watching it until this summer.

I wish I could say the impetus for watching this show was something other than it is, but the facts are these: David E. Kelley decided he wanted to make an American version of Life on Mars. This is not the first time a BBC concept has been corrupted for American audiences. The Office, BBC style, was a one-season romp through office life, a parody and satire of reality. It is a four-season top-billed show in the U.S. When I heard that this beloved show was going to be aired on ABC, I decided I had to see the original before I dove into the classic, a bit like not being able to appreciate The Dukes of Hazard movie unless you’ve seen the original series.

I watched four or five episodes of the first series before I realized I could find the pilot of Life on Mars (U.S.) online. I know this is technically illegal, but so is playing a CD in the car when your friend who does not own that CD is listening to it. (Copyright law is fun!) So I decided hey, why not give it a look?

Big mistake.

Everything—and I mean everything—is a bastardization of the original. It’s not even set in 1972! It’s late-seventies L.A., which basically makes it a horrible homage to 1970s cop shows in the U.S. which, I’m sorry, is not the same as 1970s cop shows in Britain. Not at all. And that aside, they take the best parts of the show away and turn it into a parody of the original. Gene Hunt, the British equivalent of a captain, is an alcoholic, homophobic, angry racist with a predilection towards hardcore sexism and a superiority complex. He is all but castrated by Colm Meaney, an actor who I loved as Miles O'Brien but, let's face it, doesn't translate well from meandering starship crew to hard-drinking, hard-smoking detective. The original series focused a lot more on the politics of the police department, a luxury that the show can take because BBC series generally run a true hour (no forty-four minutes of glory like in the U.S.); the U.S. version instead spends its time setting up sexual tension for Sam Tyler.

Which is my biggest issue with the American Life on Mars, if I'm honest. In the original, Annie--the female cop, the main love interest, the "girl"--is a complex, really well thought-out character. She's completely part of the zeitgeist that is the 1970s in Britain's police force; she's relegated to menial labor when she could be part of the team because female police constables were not trusted or treated the same way as men. They call her a "plunk" the whole way through, but Annie still manages to have... I'm not sure I'd call it innocence, but there's a sweetness in her demeanor. She's not the hard-nosed anything, because that wasn't the time period.

Annie in the the American version is the Tough Chick Cop.

She's ballsy. She's brash. She's all guts and glory, swagger and sex. She's the victim of sexual harassment, maybe, to an extent, but she seems to like it. Instead of being embarrassed in the first episode, when Sam sidles up to her and makes her the "victim" in a case he's profiling (something new to the cops in the BBC version, but strangely, not the American one), she holds her own. No hint of being bothered by the hooting and hollering she gets from the other guys. She could just as easily be placed in a modern crime series--I think, for some reason, of Charlie Crews's partner from the NBC series Life as I say this--and fit in just fine, other than the slang.

It was forty-four minutes of just truly off-putting television.

I'm not saying that it's not possible to turn it around. Well, actually, I am. The concept loses so much in the translation that it's not worth the effort. The BBC's version of Life on Mars really seems to hook into the issues and tribulations of the time period; ABC's version feels almost like an homage, with the snappiest cars and outfits, the quirky chick detective, the glamour of early L.A. I don't feel it. The atmosphere doesn't allow you to suspend your disbelief. You're still tuned in to the modern times, and what you do see of those "glory days" belong more in an SNL skit than a whole series.

I'm not sure how it's going to go over when it premieres. I'll watch; I'll watch anything these days. But it's on late enough on Thursdays that I'm not sure I'll bother making it a regular event. There is no Sam Tyler but the original, no Gene Hunt but the original, and besides, I already know the whole plot, start to finish.

You can't really improve on something that's already tight, well-written, and atmospheric, anyway.