TV is the New Reading

ABC ’70s cop drama needs less “Life,” more “Mars”

So far, ABC’s “Life on Mars” has been a reasonably OK cop drama, but it’s not delivering especially well on the sci-fi promises of the original British series.

“Life on Mars” follows the adventures of Sam Tyler, a present-day police detective felled by a hit-and-run. When he comes to, he’s still a cop, but it’s 1973.

He suspects he’s in a coma, but the life he’s experiencing is uncannily real. He gets flashes of the present -- he thinks he can hear his doctors and his girlfriend talking to him through the radio and television, and through phones that ring but only he can hear them. Also, he gets his own grown-up perspective on what his mom and dad went through when he was a young kid. And he encounters this Mars rover that sometimes leads him to important clues, but often is just weird and annoying.

On one hand, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how easy it’s been to accept the characters in the role of their British counterparts. In the UK version, Philip Glenister’s chief inspector Gene Hunt was a perfect fit, energywise, with John Simm’s apparent time-traveler Tyler, and the rest of the homicide division fell in line – Ray the Thug, Chris the Rookie and Annie, the token female in the department who can’t get any respect.

In the U.S. version, Harvey Keitel plays a brilliant Hunt, but his character doesn’t have the same give-and-take with Jason O’Mara’s Tyler as Glenister has with Simm. O’Mara, however, does have better chemistry with Michael Imperioli’s Ray, which gets him into better scrapes. In the U.S. version, for instance, Ray hooked Sam up with the chief’s daughter, which you just know isn’t going to end well.

All that being said, however, it feels like the U.S. version is happy to accept Tyler as a present-day cop stuck in 1973. The various weirdnesses Tyler experiences in the U.K. version – the nightmares, the disorientation, the hallucinations that distract him at the worst possible moments – these don’t occur with nearly the frequency in the U.S. version.

Instead, O’Mara’s Tyler tracks the 1973 version of his family and spends a lot more time with them. The clues he gets that he might be dreaming all of this – that he might just be in a coma in the present day – are rare, short-lived and far less compelling than they are in the U.K. version.

As a viewer and a fan, I don’t need the U.S. version of “Life on Mars” to be exactly the same. It might go in entirely different directions. It already has on one or two points. But one thing I loved about the U.K. original was that Simm’s Tyler never became comfortable with the reality he was experiencing. He fought it more and drew more on his experience to be a better cop and to improve the department.

By contrast, O’Mara isn’t fighting as much, and besides a few modern-day references, he’s mostly assimilating. That’s better for him, probably, but a lot less compelling as a story. Now that the show has returned from winter break, my hope is that the writing improves a little.

“Life on Mars” airs 9 p.m. Thursdays on ABC.

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