Pop Vultures

Usually, I feel it’s not really fair to judge an entire series on its pilot episode. Premiere or pilot episodes are often a bit clunky; the actors haven’t settled into their roles yet, the sets have a tendency to look cheap and unfinished (because they often are), and the entire thing is really just a sales pitch. “Like this? We’ll make more!” There’s a lot of room for forgiveness in a pilot episode. My normal policy is to give a series a three-episode grace period, to determine if it’s going to be something that interests me enough to allow it to cut into my reading and Internet time.

The American version of Life on Mars is getting no such grace period. It’s already wasted two hours of my time. First there was the ill-conceived, ill-written, and ill-acted LA-based pilot, and now comes its second bite at the apple — and not just any apple. The Big Apple.

The basic premise of the show, for those of you who’ve been living on, well, Mars, is based on a big city cop who gets slammed 35 years into the past. We first meet our hero, Sam Tyler (Jason O’Mara) in the middle of a high-speed race to the house of a suspected serial killer. His partner and girlfriend, Maya (Lisa Bonet), is along for the ride and a Relationship Discussion. Yeah, this is the appropriate time and place – perhaps this is supposed to illustrate how he’s more committed to the job than her. Either way, it feels lazy and rushed.

Which is exactly how one could describe the overall pacing of the show: lazy and rushed. At times the writers seem so focused on getting on with their story or shoving information at the viewer that the character development loses out, and that’s a damn shame in a show like this, where everything rests on character. Far too often, the pace and writing rely on “tell tell tell, and then tell some more.”

By the time Sam is catapulted into the past, the viewer should be close enough to him to feel his disorientation and distress at his situation, where everything old is new again, and the dawn of forensic police work isn’t yet pinking the horizon. Instead, the drama feels like it’s played for laughs and we never get a true sense of how Sam’s dealing with being thrust into something utterly impossible. Jason O’Mara is simply miscast in this role. Sam’s a cop, but a cerebral cop. O’Mara can’t seem to hit the cerebral marks and, due to his size, his carriage is exactly the same as everyone else’s. He isn’t physically separated from his new squad mates in any way.

The characters in the past are paper-thin stereotypes of what we’ve seen on most cop shows through the years, except these are pale shadows of the clichés that preceded them. At least in re-casting the role of Gene Hunt with Harvey Keitel, there’s a real New Yorker in the mix who actually lived through the time period he’s acting. I may have only been seven in 1973, but even I know that cops would not be speaking the wholly unbelieveable quasi-Cockney that comes tumbling out of Detective Ray Carling’s (Michael Imperioli) mouth like some kind of TV-safe Tourette’s. There’s no way you’d ever get me to believe a cop like Ray would say, “You’re a lunatic! You’re crazier than he is, and he’s crazier than a fruit bat at a cranberry convention.”

I’ll let you just savor that gem for a bit.

Sam’s one touchstone amidst this chaos is supposed to be the open-hearted but tough Annie Norris (Gretchen Mol), a young woman with a psychology degree who’s too much a lightweight in both mannerism and temperament to be a rookie officer in the NYC police department. Her interactions with Sam come off as too modern for the times, and too intellectually timid to inhabit these early years of feminism in which women were fighting tooth and nail for their right to be accepted as equals in the workplace. Mol’s Annie doesn’t even attempt to defend herself or hold her place when targeted by one of Ray’s many crude put-downs. How’s she supposed to help Sam hold himself together when she can’t even look most of her co-workers in the eye? She’s a long way off from Pepper.

With paper-thin characters and little emotional heft, the two, count ‘em two, shots of 1973’s Twin Towers feel gratuitous and manipulative. Unfortunately for the creators of this show, the era they’re recreating really was a watershed in New York filmmaking and the cop genre, so every false note bangs up against the contemporaneous material in our cultural memory. They’d have been better off choosing another city, one that didn’t know Popeye Doyle or Serpico or even Klute. Rent one of those or, better yet, check out the original UK version of Life on Mars. Don’t waste your time on this one.