Life on MarsYou Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadows?
Original Air Date: Oct 30, 2008
Kathryn – TwoCents Reviewer
kathryn@twocentscorp.com
Filling in for the lovely Tara is Kathryn, your poor substitute until the real thing gets back (technical problems – she is here in spirit, but her cable company doesn’t agree). Kathryn has a vague understanding of Life on Mars because she saw the British one and presumes the American one isn’t much different, just with less/more sillier accents.
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[photo: ABC]
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Life on Mars
ReplyDeleteYou Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadows?
Original Air Date: Oct 30, 2008
Kathryn – TwoCents Reviewer
kathryn@twocentscorp.com
Filling in for the lovely Tara is Kathryn, your poor substitute until the real thing gets back (technical problems – she is here in spirit, but her cable company doesn’t agree). Kathryn has a vague understanding of Life on Mars because she saw the British one and presumes the American one isn’t much different, just with less/more sillier accents.
Everyone still remembers the premise? A very nice contemporary policeman who doesn’t think women are just potential ‘knees up’ material and doesn’t consider beating up suspects as a recreational sport is bamfed into Middle Earth. Tragically he overshoots Gandalf and ends up in a seventies’ police station with Harvey Keitel and a whole bunch of people with weird facial hair.
If we overlook the main flaw of the show, i.e. why didn’t he just invest in a small company called Microsoft and retire, it’s clever.
I promised myself I wouldn’t do an Alan Shore soapbox moment, but eight point something million viewers aside, I’m lousy at promises and I am also narked at David E. Kelly abandoning my beloved Boston Legal to try to instill some sense of quirky British thinking into the American viewing public.
I’m just a bit bewildered at why America couldn’t just order the box set like the rest of the world and even more bewildered as to why the cast don’t trip over their terrifying ‘take an eye out’ lapels.
Because of Two and a Half Men I’m a natural pessimist regarding American TV. But with no Charlie Sheen in sight, this is quirky, clever, fun and I’m hooked – if only to see Harvey Keitel beat the stuffing out of everyone… hang on – he does that in every thing he’s been in. I’m pretty sure he beat up the piano in The Piano. I know someone did and Sam Neil doesn’t seem the piano murdering type.
Jason O’Mara isn’t quite as ‘masterful’ as Sam Tyler as the British Sam (so nice to know that the Americans will now get that joke). But as Tara might have put it; he’s not exactly bad eye candy and there are worse things to look at for an hour. I was rather amused to learn (while doing extensive re-Google-search) Sam Tyler was named by one of the writer’s kids after the character Rose Tyler from Doctor Who. See, it all comes down to Doctor Who; although this might be because Doctor Who Inc is keeping the entire British TV industry afloat – and large chunks of Wales.
Speaking of time travel: if rule number one for time travelers is never cross your own time line, rule number two has to be don’t start thinking about your mum that way, especially when little you is in the next room, mostly because it’s just wrong on so many levels.
The problem is that no matter where you go in life (or in this case time) someone you know will invariably pop up. Just trust me on this one.
In Sam’s case it’s his mom. Although in 1973 this would probably be considered flirting, Sam imposes his 21st century morals when he spots a thug flinging a woman into a car. By an amazing coincidence she’s his mom. She has fantastic dress sense and she’s called Rose – get it? The subtley of this show is amazing: if I spot a big blue box in the next half hour and David Tennant that’s it.
By another amazing coincidence which has nothing to do with Doctor Who, the thug works for the local crime boss so the other boys back at the precinct won’t prosecute him because he gives them the odd tip off. A handy fact to remember if you’re ever going to take up a career as a serial killer.
Harvey takes Sam to what the set designers imagined Studio 54 looked like to meet the local crime boss. Local Crime Boss offers Sam a big cigar, but Sam is not as interested as Bill Clinton. He’s more concerned with his present day forwardbacks of George Bush.
‘Why am I in 1973?’ he asks the police woman friend who has the most unbelievable Doris Day hairstyle ever seen outside a Doris Day movie. Understandably, not having watched Doctor Who, she thinks Sam’s nuts and by this point we are so confused we forgive the fact she looks as if she has just stepped off the cover of a nineteen fifties cigarette packet and just go with the flow.
Mom owes the crime boss money and Sam has noticed a lot of the ladies of the night who work for the crime boss tend to end up in the river. Harvey tells him the pay offs go toward the police borough’s ‘rat fink squealing fund’, but Sam’s not impressed as he suspects Serial Killer Thug has his eye on his mom, especially after the lady of the night sent to drug and blackmail him also takes a late night dip.
Sam’s self righteousness is getting to Harvey. Even though he’s not working on the show anymore it still shows. It’s time for the David E. Really Memorial message about truth and justice. Harvey and Sam bust those mobster asses. While doing this Sam spots his mom – ‘working’ off her debt. “Go home,” he tells her. Thankfully she does and, as Harvey burns all his mob money, we know 1973 is a little closer to changing for the better. They’ve still got those rubbish mustaches though.
Can we please have a Two Cent show of support for this show? I was the same with Buffy: ‘there’s no way I’m watching something called that,’ I yelled. But as soon as I laid eyes on Giles and realized I’d actually vaguely known the man for ten years but had never thought of him in ‘that’ way I was hooked.
Please tell me David E. didn’t go to all this trouble for nothing. Forget Sam was named after Billie Piper’s space alien killing Doctor Who chav and show your support for an excellent show.