One of the shows I'd been watching recently while I work was Life On Mars, which was a super megahit on UK TV back in 2006. I think my dad might have even been pirating it as it was airing? After watching through it, I can see why it was popular, it comes together as what I think is more than the sum of it's parts and is really compelling.

In case you're not familiar, Sam Tyler is a cop who gets hit by a car during a murder investigation in 2006 in which his girlfriend (who is also a cop) gets kidnapped by the murderer because she tries to go after him alone. This last part is only a big deal for a few episodes, they seem to forget about that right away. After he gets hit by the car, he wakes up in 1973 with all the knowledge of today. This means he has alot more modern know-how than the cops of 33 years ago, and when he tries to do things like "record interviews with suspects and witnesses on tape" everyone goes "whaaaat you can do that???"

The core of Life on Mars after the first episode establishes the world is twofold. The first is that he's in a coma, though the show tries to keep it vague. There's lots of things happening to Sam that are, for lack of a better term, supernatural. He can hear people talking to him from the hospital; his mother, his girlfriend, the doctors, etc. This manifests, usually, through the TV or the Radio. The girl from the BBC Test Card pops out of the TV sometimes to give him a good old fashioned The Shining Creepy Child moment. Things that happen in 2006 affect Sam's 1973 reality. In one episode, his mother gives the doctors consent to turn off his life support at 2 PM, immediately after Sam learns this, a hostage situation arises and the criminal says he's going to kill a hostage at 2. The second is the relationship Sam builds with the various 1973 inhabitants of Manchester. Gene Hunt is his boss, a few of the other cops such as Gene and Chris he works with frequently, and Annie is his Love Interest™, a WPC (Womans Police Constable) and later on in the series Sam recommends her for a Detective Inspector promotion. Some of the UK cop-lingo like this is lost on me as an American that grew up with a healthy distrust of the police. (ACAB, for the record, especially Gene Hunt & Ray).

Speaking of distrusting the police, turns out the police officers of 1973 are all super shitty and crooked! Gene in particular is prone to violence, racism, and homophobia. The cops are all getting paid off by a local crimelord. This doesn't sit right with Sam, the squeaky clean cop from the future. He tries to impart some of the morals he has onto the team, and he has a little bit of success with Gene here and there, but mostly Gene's still corrupt as hell by the end. Unfortunately this street goes both ways, Sam, being from 30 years in the future, has future knowledge of events and keeps running into people he knows as super dangerous future criminals. But you can't arrest someone for something that hasn't happened yet, he tries to talk to one of the criminal's wives that came to him for protection in the future about it, who says he's full of shit. Sam then offers to frame him, and you can see him realize what he's saying mid sentence and regretting it. Not so squeaky clean now, are you Sam? Sam also runs into his parents frequently, particularly in Season 1. Sam's father ran off in 1973, so Sam deduces (incorrectly) that if he wants to wake up, he's got to prevent his dad from running out on the family. Oops! Anyway, it's really good, makes for alot of interesting individual episodes.

I also found out that it got a sequel series, Ashes to Ashes. This week I finished the first season. The premise is that a different cop gets shot in 2008 and winds up the same group of cops that Sam Tyler was working with in his coma. There's a couple of differences, for example, instead of 1973 it's 1981, Gene, Ray, and Chris reprise their roles from Sam's experience, and the whole thing is now set in London. Sam and Annie are nowhere to be found. A couple of things have stood out about the show watching it immediately after Life on Mars. Most of the time it's trying to not be Life on Mars and have it's own identity... sometimes this works to its detriment, but sometimes it pays off. But sometimes it is not doing this at all, and instead feels like it's trying to capture lightning in a bottle a second time.

Gene, Ray and Chris don't seem to have changed much, character wise, except the show now focuses on Gene through the lens of a love interest, where in Life on Mars he was more of an anti-hero that Sam befriends over time. Ray is still pretty bigoted (as is Gene but he's less racist and the focus in 1981 is more about homophobia), Chris, interestingly, despite eight years having passed between Life on Mars and now, is still a dimwit that seems like he's only been on the force six months. This is especially noticeable because Sam had sort of taken Chris under his wing in Life on Mars, showed him alot of really neat forensics type stuff that just wasn't known back then, and Chris seemed to really take to it. Here, Chris doesn't have a mentor figure. In one episode, he picks up a buttplug not knowing what it is & Alex has to explain it to him. Certainly by 1981 if you've been a cop for eight years you've seen a few buttplugs before, right?

Shraz, who seems like she's meant to replace Annie, is dating Chris. Since Chris is a tertiary character, this doesn't get much attention like Sam and Annie's relationship did, and when Shraz is nearly fatally injured near the end of Season 1, it doesn't carry the same emotional weight as it would have with Annie.

Ashes to Ashes as a whole seems to be focusing more on being a Miami Vice style 80's police action show than Life on Mars did. Now, since I was not around in 1973, it could be that Life on Mars was trying to emulate Police Shows of the era and it just went over my head, but Ashes to Ashes seems to be going harder on the concept. The focus, character-wise, is more on Alex's psychological profiling skills & the crime of the week, Alex being in a coma seems secondary. We get clown hallucinations ala the Test Card Girl sometimes, but we never hear anyone in the hospital trying to talk to her like we did with Sam. Instead, she just gets visions of her daughter Molly, who she has very one-sided conversations with. Molly never answers, but Alex always takes the time to swear she's working hard to get back to reality.... which means she's VERY aware that she's in her own brain. I think Alex was a hostage negotiator, which is why she has all this psychological profiling experience. She uses that on herself constantly, saying things like "Couldn't my subconscious come up with anything better than xyz." Plus she was reading about Sam's hallucination in the first minutes of the first episode, so she's already familiar with what Sam wrote about the 1973 Manchester police office. When she gets to 1981 and realizes she's face to face with Gene Hunt & the crew, she asks where Sam is. Ray claims "he died last year."

Alex, very much like Sam, has family trouble in her history. Her parents were killed by a car bomb in 1981. She's counting down the days until the explosion, trying to do whatever she can to stop it, thinking, foolishly, that she can change the past & that will be what allows her to wake up. The important bit here is that Alex seems to befriend her Mother, who she's excited to reconnect with. She also constantly runs into her godfather who took her in as a child, except now he's young and hot! Oh no! We got a Royal Tenenbaums situation brewing here. Her dad, however, is rarely seen until the end of the season. I won't spoil it more than that but there's alot going on there & the message is still "you can't change the past."

And the shows are right. You can't change the past. Some things you can't fix, even if you went back in time/were in a coma.

I look forward to finishing Ashes to Ashes. It's not as strong as Life on Mars, but they're big shoes to fill and I think it handled Season 1 relatively well.