Life on Mars S1-S2

The premise of this show, just the idea of a 70's cop show, has huge potential. It's one of those ideas that a bunch of people in Hollywood will come up with all at once in a wave, just because the 70's are such low-hanging TV fruit. Unfortunately, the idea that was chosen is a lame one to begin with, "I woke up in the 1970's! Not sure why!" "Life On Mars" also has some very good actors. That's why it's painful watching them, as I write this comment, woodenly coughing out really, truly terrible, formulaic, banal, boring and predictable lines to a raucous backdrop of equally-formulaic 70's-era hits and flame-filled non-sensical explosions. For the past hour Sam has roamed the episode constantly dropping clever bon mots from 2008 and modern-style cop puns so that we won't forget even for a second that he's from the superior future. The writers don't miss a single moment to cram it down our throats that we're in the 70's now. I've seen every LOM so far; I held on and hoped for the best, but tonight I finally reached my disgust threshold. "Life On Mars" has everything it needs going for it except sufficient cleverness. "Lost", the show that comes on (for me) before it, is so well-written that one can suspend disbelief while an entire island (replete with ghosts, no less) disappears and skips around the Indian Ocean. "Life On Mars" has a far more down-to-Earth plot, but it needs a miracle at least as big as Lost's sapient island to make it work.

I rarely watch TV, but I was absolutely hooked to Life on Mars. It was gripping and real and took me back to the 1970s. I loved every episode and can't wait for the next series. It was intelligent and humorous, more than I can say for most of what is on TV today! Sam was so believable; lost and vulnerable. Fighting his corner against his boss, but every now and then, the two of them were in accord! I was convinced that the final episode would find Sam coming out of his coma. It was great to get to the last episode to find out that it was a cliff-hanger... we have to wait until the second series. The plots are good and they really do portray the 70s as it was. This is the best TV drama I have seen in years - don't miss it!

There are some shows which sound dodgy on paper but prove themselves to be better than they sound. Life on Mars is not one of those shows. It starts with such a fantastic concept - 21st Century Police Officer goes back to the 70s - that everyone involved must have known they had a chance of making something truly great. While the first episode was not perfect - in particular the opening 10 minutes was overly crammed with exposition masquerading as dialogue - it is already fulfilling much of its initial promise. As well as the superb production values that one would expect from the producers of Spooks and Hustle, this show has set up two intriguing ongoing mysteries both of which ought to be well worth watching unspool over the next seven weeks.

I watched this when it first came out in 2006 and liked it and thought it was entertaining . However I went back to it recently , 17 years later, and found that it was not near as good as I remembered . The storylines were very predictable and the jokes cringe inducing especially from cop Gene. (To a woman witness: 'Anything you want to get off your chest' .. is this aimed at 12 year olds or something??) .. I eventually had to give up after 5 episodes ,, each one worse than the next until I got to episode 5 the one where a ManU fan is found dead.... this episode contains some of the worst acting I've ever seen,, like the part where one of the cops gets caught in a football net and has one of the most pathetic punch up /brawl sequences I have ever seen. The main mystery of the story is still mildly interesting but the silly police stuff in between (90% of it) is just woeful ,, each one like a very bad episode of Starsky & Hutch,,, only with a lost less class ...

I'm giving a vote of 9 out of 10 to Life on Mars, even though I know BBC America must be butchering the episodes they are screening in the US. IMDb says the runtime is 58 minutes. After you take out the commercials and endless promos BBC America runs each hour (at least 8 or 9 minutes must be for that brain sucking waste of time, Footballers Wives), I'm guessing we in the US are viewing about 44 minutes out of the 58. So good is Life on Mars, however, I'm willing to put up with it--and hope for the full version DVDs later. What makes this show tick? Perhaps it's the ever present dreamscape quality--made possible by the slight sepia tint seemingly applied on most setups, which combine with the bright incandescent interior lighting of the institutional quality police stations, bar rooms, and housing projects to give a greenish, otherworldly haze to many scenes. Combine this with the fun look back into a time without computers, fax machines and those damnable cell phones and you have poor Sam Tyler facing off with an English version of Dirty Harry. Combustible. Not to mention that Sam's holier than thou attitude is beginning to lose out to the realists on the beat. All of it makes for a very interesting hour--or 44 minutes.

I admit I only watched the first 2 episodes of this series so maybe it's unfair to judge, but for me if a TV series can't grab your imagination at the beginning then it generally isn't worth persevering with. My overriding impression from this series is that the people involved basically wanted to make a 70's cop show but couldn't get the funding, so threw in a weak sci-fi angle in order to get the project off the ground. What is left is something that doesn't quite work as either. I found there wasn't enough depth to the lead character's life in the present day. We knew he was a fairly high ranking police inspector and that he had a girlfriend, that was about it. Not enough to really know why he was in (or dreaming he was in)1973 or really care whether he got back to 2006. The cop drama aspect had incredibly clichéd characters, that showed no real progression in the early episodes and the crime solving/investigation plots were average at best. The result appears to be a mediocre cop show that is occasionally interrupted by bad dreams and voices of doctors overheard by a patient in a coma. Maybe it get's better and if the show hadn't been rated so highly by so many I wouldn't have had such high expectations in the first place, but I can't help but feel it should be much better than it is.

This show purports to be weird, but "weird" can't make it exciting. The good stuff: the audience is drawn in by the surreal concept as presented in the first episode, there are some nice uses of the "out of time" premise throughout to explain how police procedures and behavior have changed since the 1970s, and Philip Glenister steals the show as Gene Hunt, the foul-mouthed chief inspector who runs roughshod over Sam Tyler, the 2006 hot cop stranded in a decade of bell bottoms and bad British food. But those quirks don't make for a great show, or even a good one, really. The first series goes downhill around the time the producers toss us a maudlin after-school-special episode about football hooliganism, featuring a blank-faced, flat-voiced child actor - far from the only misplaced youngster to torture our eyes and ears in this series. The writing varies greatly in quality from episode to episode, and the supposed payoff in the final episode of series 1 is both predictable and nonsensical, attached to the supposed overarching plot by the flimsiest of threads. For some reason, we're given the same 'tense', underwhelming Freudian scene twice within the last minutes of Series One. It makes no narrative sense the first time - and I don't mean it's surreal or challenging; it simply makes no sense for the protagonist to behave the way he does, even according to the dream-logic of the show. The second time we're forced to sit through the same mystifying confrontation, I felt my brain down-shifting from "frustrated" to "bored", and began thinking about my lunch plans for the following day . . . not the sort of rumination that the show's creators wanted to evoke, I'd assume. The rest of the cast does fine with what they're given, and deserves plenty of the praise they've received, but decent delivery of so-so scripts, hints of warped reality, and a little retro comedy here and there? None of this covers up how this show is somewhere beneath the lesser-known Law & Order series when it comes to the cop stuff. And "Life on Mars" is about 80-90% low-quality cop stuff, with the bizarre elements as window dressing. There's a lot of Our Hero leaping to miraculous conclusions when he happens to overhear a word vaguely related to the case. There's a lot of sniveling rats getting slammed into walls, and a lot of shady characters suddenly spilling their guts when they're asked the same question, but slowly. And. Seriously. This time. You've seen it before, and done better, too. "Life on Mars" tries to pass all of this off as reference to the 1970s cop dramas it both mocks and worships, but instead, it comes across as lazy and aimless imitation of better prime-time television drama from the 2000s. I stuck with it in the hopes that the first series would end on a high note that would bring me back for the second, but really, the first series finale episode is some of the worst TV I've ever seen. This gets 5 out of 10, because if you picked a random cop drama OR a random Twin-Peaks-imitating weird-out suspense series to watch instead, there's about a 50% chance it would be better than "Life on Mars".