This looked like such a great idea for a series. A cop in Manchester is hit by a car in 2006. When he wakes up, it’s 1973. He’s still a cop (a new transfer from “Hull”), though his car & his clothes are rather different, and everyone else seems to have transferred from The Sweeney. Is he in a coma, mad, or has he travelled in time? The series screams “HE’S IN A COMA!” at least twelve times each episode, but maddeningly refuses to develop the overarching plot.
The show captures the look & feel of ‘70s tv pretty well. It doesn’t particularly resemble real life, but neither do any other cop shows I can think of. Unfortunately, the inventiveness of the show ends with “Quantum Leap meets The Sweeney”. Every episode is a typical cop show story, plodding and predictable with plenty of room for moralizing from Our Hero, mostly about how much better things would be in the future if people in the past didn’t fuck things up so badly.
Clearly influenced by the work of Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective, Lipstick On Your Collar, etc), this has none of the depth or intelligence of his work.
The cast is quite strong, but the characters are defiantly two dimensional. John Simm is fine as DI Sam Tyler, whose main character point is that he is from the future and wants to get back. Philip Glenister is smashing as DCI Gene Hunt, who is tough, doesn’t play by the rules, and can drink any crim under the table – essentially he’s Jack Regan only not played by John Thaw. Dean Andrews’s moustache is perfect as DS Ray Carling’s moustache, fitting as it does on the upper lip of a total prick.
Almost every episode ties itself up into a neat little ball in the end, ‘cause this is a cop show and loose ends don’t happen. Opportunities at subversion and clever plotting are wasted at every turn. It almost doesn’t matter what unrealistic cops vs. Robbers tosh happens, ‘cause the story every time is “Tyler and Hunt don’t like each other, Tyler goes against Hunt, between Tyler’s futuristic know-how and Hunt’s police brutality they fit up the right bad guy, they give each other grudging respect, and then at the start of the next episode they’re back to where they started.”
There’s some nice stuff involving using the test pattern girl & her doll as a Mario Bava-esque scary little girl ghost, but for me this show was an infuriatingly mediocre mess of missed opportunities and blundering clichés. At only eight episodes, it shouldn't have had time to get as stale as it did.
I thought tv was supposed to be on a general upswing since I stopped watching it seven years ago, and that this was a particularly acclaimed show. To me it’s the same old bollocks re-packaged, in more ways than one. I guess I have to check out the second, and final, season just to find out if they ever get around to throwing anything unexpected into the mix.
Not recommended.
Posted by pearce at August 20, 2007 1:00 PMPearce - DO NOT WATCH SECOND SERIES! If that was your response to the first, then don't watch the sencond. It was only watching the second that I really got annoyed with them not developing a storyline past a single episode. I still liked it-- a lot -- but you won't get anything out of the second series but further irritation on the points you've raised in your post.
I'll let you know what Ashes to Ashes is like.
On other Life on Mars news, it is another Brit show that they are taking to the US. I've no idea why...
Sounds like I got more out of it than you , but I agree Life on Mars is a disappointment plot wise, in that the actual episodes are borderline-cliche cop-show stories when it promised so much more. Sorry to here this is more of a problem in the next season Chuck.
I did like their picture of the 70s a lot though, skewering our modern image of that decade to show it (in UK anyway) as a hard and depressing time, racism, poverty etc rampant - feels a far more realistic picture than I've seen before. (Though maybe The Sweeney or other 70s shows caught that too).
You can't give up on TV totally Pearce while they still make stuff like The Wire though!
Posted by: Ben at August 22, 2007 2:16 PM