TV is the New Reading

Time travel cop drama spinoff “Ashes to Ashes” coming to BBC America

If you’ve been enjoying the time-traveling adventures of Sam Tyler in ABC’s “Life on Mars,” you may be interested in the spinoff from the British original, premiering this weekend on BBC America.

“Life on Mars” – both the American and the original British version – are sci-fi cop dramas in which a modern-day detective, Det. Sam Tyler, gets in a car accident and wakes up in 1973.

Tyler’s still a cop, working metro homicide in London and New York, respectively, but with very different ideas about how to catch criminals and work cases. Forensics is in its infancy, lab work takes weeks to come back, computers are nonexistent and what’s more, Tyler is given more and more to hallucinations that make him wonder what his situation is, exactly – whether he’s in a coma, in a madhouse, or whether he has, in fact, traveled in time.

The title “Life on Mars” comes from a David Bowie song. The spinoff, set in the 1980s, is also named for a David Bowie song. It’s called “Ashes to Ashes.” It features the relentlessly glamorous Keeley Hawes as time-traveler Alex Drake.

In the modern-era, button-down Drake had been researching the notes of the mysteriously vanished Det. Tyler when she caught a junkie’s bullet trying to rescue her daughter.

So when she wakes up in 1981 with ’80s hair and clothes and interacting with mildly updated versions of Tyler’s ’70s colleagues, she assumes that she – a trained division psychologist – is simply hallucinating through the final seconds of her life. Adding credence to her theory is the recurring appearance of her present-day attacker dressed as Pierrot from the cover of Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” single.

Memories

But as her ’80s existence persists, she begins to imagine reasons that she might be where she is. For instance, she becomes obsessed with finding a way to save her parents from the bomb attack that killed them in her childhood. Sadly, there are very few ways for her to communicate her concerns that won’t get her locked away as a looney, so she has to be at least somewhat circumspect.

Also, she maintains a voice-recording she hopes the daughter she rescued might somehow find in the future. In the meantime, she works with her boss and colleagues, trying to drag them kicking and screaming into a more liberated understanding of women in the workplace.

The show suffers a bit by comparison to the original, but most American viewers will be approaching it fresh, as a departure from the similar but significantly different American version of “Life on Mars” airing Thursdays at 9 p.m. on ABC. Alex Drake is no Sam Tyler – either the British version or the American one – and her adventures are absolutely her own.

British spinoff “Ashes to Ashes” airs at 8 p.m. Saturdays on BBC America, and is certainly worth a look.

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