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.

American Idle.

Ha! Starting it off with a pun. Go me.

American Idol has been a staple of American reality television for the last six years. I'm not going to go into the history of American Idol, or about how the British show Pop Idol came first, because that would make me sound like a bitter Anglophile who is sick of America ripping off other programs.

Anyway.

This season of American Idol, if Ryan Seacrest is to be believed, is the "best", with some of the "brightest talent" and "most amazing singers" that the franchise has ever seen. As viewers, we have the "amazing" talent of these young people beaten into our heads every time we turn on the television. Simon, Paula, and Randy assure us that it's "anybody's game".

And that's my issue with this season's Idol.

I was never a great AI aficionado. I watched Season 3 because my mother watched it, and Seasons 5 and 6 under great duress from friends who are far more in tune (music pun!) with reality television than I am. Reality television bores me, mostly because I watch television to escape reality, and watching a mockery of "real life" never suited me. But American Idol offers the voyeurism and buy-in of watching some young person supposedly make or break their career, and that hooked me. Some singers were talented and some were not. I liked that. I liked the fact that Sanjaya from Season 6 couldn't carry a tune in a bucket but had great hair. I liked that Chris Daughtry in Season 5 had a lot of personality and his own idea of how his songs should go. I never felt like any of the major personalities that came out of the competition lacked, well, personality. They always had something to them, some meat to sink my teeth into.

This season is just boring. Every singer is a good singer. Every singer is a consistent singer. Performances are universally pretty decent (with the exception of the Andrew Lloyd Webber theme night, where people actually didn't do well for the first time in weeks). Literally anyone could win, and it's come down to technicalities and who the American voting public thinks is cute.

The talent aspect of the oft-lauded "talent competition" has been removed.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the universal issue with reality shows once they hit the third or fourth season. Take Top Chef, my favorite reality competition, as an example. First season, several of the contestants weren't professional chefs. They were caterers, or just stay-at-home moms who really liked to cook. They had personality and drive, which made them interesting to watch even if they couldn't flambe particularly well. I related better to them as competitors because they weren't all executive chefs at such-and-such a restaurant in Big City, USA.

But as the show has become popular, the caliber of contestants who audition increases. As the caliber increases, it's less interesting to watch as a viewer because everyone's so good. This season's Top Chef is mostly about technicalities because all the chefs are talented and all the food is good. They have yet to serve a dish that the viewer, as a lay-person, can look at and reject as not appetizing. During one elimination round, one of the three who were on the chopping block was there because his station was too messy. That was it! Not a technical issue with the dish, but because it just wasn't neat enough.

I don't want to watch chefs organize their area. I want to see the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I don't want to watch the people on American Idol get voted off based solely on the fact that the fifteen-year-old-girl fanbase is simply not present for contestant X, Y, or Z. I want to see the drama and the actual talent.

We're not getting that, and frankly, it's starting to make guilty-pleasure TV boring. I'm not actually complaining--I think that it's time for the swan song of reality television, or at least, the prelude to it--but if you're going to sell it to us, Seacrest, tell it like it is:

"The most vocally similar and personality-less set of contestants in Idol history."

It's American Idol. Trust me, we'll still watch.