There is Life on Mars

ABC's Life on Mars began as a conversion of the hit BBC drama. Without professing any knowledge of British television, I thought that perhaps a straight airing of the original was in order if they were intent on a simple scene by scene remake, but I expect further divergences in the future, and being a show about time travel, time and place will effect the tone and content of Life on Mars.

Yet in spite of David E. Kelley's panache for eccentric characters and wild narratives, the first pilot felt lifeless. Colm Meaney is good at playing a brute, but he lacks the street smarts that Harvey Keitel brings to the part of Gene Hunt. I don't know what would make a good Annie Cartwright, but thanks to an expanded part, Gretchen Mol doesn't get lost in the shuffle (the uniform also makes her more distinctive). Gretchen is much more personable of an actor here.

There is a lack of urgency in the original pilot that made the aired version so compelling. It lacks some punch. The aired version knocks you on the floor from the opening moments: Chris Cornell's Ground Zero is conflated with the sound of sirens and the bickering of Sam and Maya as they rush to the crime scene. It dispenses with all of the pointless fat that made the original pilot so slow and instead drives forward with purpose. Not much time is spent on Colin Raimes, fortunately, and the show drives forward to the clever reveal. The misplaced twin in a moment puts Maya in imminent danger, and it's the kind of punch that is lacking from the original pilot. As Sam arrives in the past, the aired version is once again more emotionally resonant. The song Life on Mars soars, and the image of the twin towers distills everything that is wrong with the situation. It only took half the time to arrive at this point, but already this is the more compact and hard hitting version.

It's unavoidable in time travel stories all of the stages of disbelief and acceptance that the main character faces. Mercifully, Life on Mars makes it quick. The twin towers here reminds me of a scene in the movie Philadelphia. Tom Hanks plays a man with AIDS who faces prejudice and hate. The moment in which his lawyer realizes the humanity of the Hanks character could have been overwrought and ridiculous. Instead, it is a scene where Hanks plays an opera that mirrors the strife and struggle that a homosexual must face. Wordless, breathless, and beautiful, Hanks bears his soul as the music plays. It is the best way to fight an inevitable cliche: do it through images and sounds that contain powerful of emotions, or create a scene that is so clever that it actually fights the cliche.

The narrative remains mostly constant here until the end, so the aired version asserts itself in different ways. Casting is one element. The heavy saturation of yellow drips from every frame, foreign and strange, suggesting life on another planet. Music isn't just rock and roll from the time but instead quintessential 70s. Camera cuts are swift and effacing as Sam dispenses paranoid glances at the people passing him by. He spins around often. Time jumps. The viewer is never allowed to be placated or get a feel for the surroundings. He enters the police station and finally loses his grasp of reality. Contained within are some clever riffs on the state of 1970s society.

The two versions diverge again at the end. In the original pilot, Sam is confronted by a psychologist who tells him that he is actually in a coma. Convinced that he is in an illusory world, he goes to the rooftop with the intent to jump from it, believing that it is the only way to wake himself. However, it is here Annie reveals that she put the psychologist up to it so that he could connect with Sam and get through to him by his own logic. This is the best part of the pilot, but once again I think that it lacks the urgency of the aired version, in which Sam urges a criminal to shoot him in the chest so that he may wake up from what he believes to be a coma. The reason it works is because the decision is not in his hands. Sam cannot do it himself, so the onus is on a man who may or may not be cold enough to pull the trigger. Of course Sam isn't going to jump from a building, so using logic to talk him down from the edge isn't very evocative.

The aired version also presents Sam with the chance to kill the child who will grow up to harm Maya. No time travel logic, thankfully. Once again there is no doubt that he will make the right decision, but it works here because it confronts the audience with the possibility that Sam might become a monster in order to save more lives than it will cost. That it is an emotional decision makes it even more senseless and poignant.

The grandmother scene tends to fall flat without Hunt coaxing the information out of her. It shows some wisdom on his part in how he interacts with people.

I look forward to discovering the mythology behind the series. What he does in past won't matter if Sam truly is in a coma, and there was more than one clue to suggest this. I would like it all to be real, however, if for no other reason than to offer a far more complex and ultimately rewarding solution than the simple coma explanation allows.