Does anyone else watch Life On Mars?

My housemate worked on this, she said it was a nightmare. After hearing about the actors moaning about the long shoots and finishing late, it was funny to see Mr Simm getting interviewed and saying, “yeah it was great, I really enjoyed it”. The whole cast and crew had a week off because he was tired.

that's the best bit!

As who? Come on, THINK! Would some seventies music help?

hahahahaha! (and I like the programme.)

I didn't like Monday's episode very much, maybe because I thought it was going to be the last one in the series for some reason, and maybe because it was just a little dull. Although I do remember the seventies as a hostagey kind of decade.

"I'm 'avin' 'oops" has become a bit of a catchphrase round these parts.

"That was a single malt. What are you, some kind of monster?"

Also, Wishing Well by Free. Get in.

Yes, she is cute. I am disappointed I missed Monday's ep now.

I still love how they don't make a big deal out of some of the best period details in it. Hairdressing in your living room. Classic.

I have not seen Heartbeat. But I think this programme tremendous, on the whole.

that last episode was SO GOOD ... until ten minutes from the end, at which point it lost the plot spectacularly.

spoiler warnings, if you taped it. although i'll try to keep it slightly abstract ;)

- so, sam discovers "the truth" about his dad. his dad can't stay with the family: he can either go to jail or run. "are you going to tell ruth and little sammy what i am?" he says. "you'll ruin their lives."

- TO WHICH, SURELY, SAM'S ANSWER SHOULD HAVE BEEN: "MINE'S RUINED ALREADY?"

- but no! sam allows history to repeat itself. to the letter. which means - dur! - obviously he's not going to get home.

- surely the obvious thing to do would be say, well, fuck it, i now know the truth about my dad and i'm going to have to live with that, no matter what. so i might as well turn him in because at least that changes something and who knows: it might wake me up?

- unless the whole point is that hunt is right, and sam subconsciously wants to stay there. hmm.

either way, i dunno. i just felt that in the last ten minutes it lost something; that even the dialogue, particularly in the confontation between sam and his dad, lost its edge. i'm rather disappointed, to be honest.

mind you, i seem to remember i gave up on "quantum leap" years ago for similar bah-that's-daft reasons. as if, eh, the whole thing wasn't daft in the first place.

are they really making a film? fuck that shit.

further to my last e-mail of nebulous and ill-formed thoughts, can i just add:

- unless the whole point is that hunt is right, and sam subconsciously wants to stay there. hmm.

in which case: can we look forward to a second series in which sam tries to avoid waking up? now that could be fun ...

- surely the obvious thing to do would be say, well, fuck it, i now know the truth about my dad and i'm going to have to live with that, no matter what. so i might as well turn him in because at least that changes something and who knows: it might wake me up?

But that would seriously fuck up little Sammy and his mum for the next 30 years (Sam still isn't 100% sure that it's all in his head and he's not really back in time). Maybe even in the coma his subconscious is adhering to the standard time travel rules about not changing the past in any radical way (I'm sure he will have watched Rose Tyler trying to save her dad and he wouldn't want the monsters chomping up anyone around him - even Gene) and realises that if he'd grown up knowing his dad was a murdering scumbag then he probably wouldn't have become a policeman, wouldn't have been hit by the car, wouldn't have gone back to 1973 and wouldn't have found out his dad was a murdering scumbag.

Wait a sec. Sam Tyler? Rose Tyler? Maybe in series 2 Sam gets transferred to the Met, marries Rose's mum and out pops Billie Piper - PREDESTINED TO TRAVEL IN TIME AND SPACE!

In my version he had been abducted by aliens (hence Life On Mars). They had tried to reconstruct Sam's world so that when he woke up on the aliens home planet he would think he was still on Earth and they could observe him. Unfortunately due to the time it took for radio and TV pictures to reach the aliens they've reconstructed Sam's world 33 years ago. Oh and obviously their understanding of Earth is based on The Sweeney. Maybe they could only get good reception on one channel.

The western gag was funny.

When is he going to start betting on football results?! Or warning about IRA bombs etc.

no

he kills himself... or does he? or something.

did I miss anything?

Yes. Series two was fantastic, IMO.

Second reboot of the American version manages to be even worse than the first unaired pilot. I switched off the second Tyler comes to in 1973 and exclaims "no way!" with a camera pan to the WTC.

BETCHA DIDN'T SEE THAT ONE COMING!

Colossal fail

Does it have the same actor playing Sam? He was my major problem with the pilot.

A look at IMDB confirms it:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0641816/

Episode 2 title: The Real Adventures of the Unreal Sam Tyler

WTF?

Does it have the same actor playing Sam? He was my major problem with the pilot.

Yes, and he is awful. Everything about the US version manages to be awful. Like Chris, I had to turn it off just a few minutes in.

But really I only turned in to see how bad it was going to be so I probably didn't give it much of a chance, but it doesn't really deserve one.

so, so bad. i made it to harvey keitel's first scene, then decided that doing the evening's dishes was a more interesting option.

"it's a cell phone. A CELL PHONE!!!"

"sir, I don't care what you're selling."

lololol so awful

I only watched five minutes of it, how did Harvey Keitel & Michael Imperioli (lol mustache) get roped into this

Harvey Keitel? WTF?

the music is awesome. but it needs a LOT more harvey keitel and michael imperioli. like in fact it should only be about their characters.

punching shit and wearing mustaches

maybe it'll get better? first two or three episodes of ANY show suck; even the wire's premier was so meh that it took me a year to come back and try again.

I think this show is pretty good so far. It definitely has potential.The WTC thing in the first episode gave me goose bumps.

I loved the first episode, but in a so-bad-it's-good sense.

I was thinking it's interesting how this type of fish-out-of-water show apparently requires the protagonist to be some kind of mild-mannered paragon of virtue, I mean if I hit my head and ended up in 1973 I would be having a BLAAAAAAASSSSSSSSST. I bet namby-pants didn't even try the lasagnajuana.

also has this guy become "that guy" in record time since Generation Kill or what
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Tergesen

Oh I see he was in OZ. never mind.

i missed the first part of this. do they explain why a cop sent back in time is still a cop when he gets there?

I think the point of the show is to leave the reasons for his "time travel" up in the air.

punching shit and wearing mustaches

That should be the name of the show.

first two or three episodes of ANY show suck;

First episode of Veronica Mars was brilliant, and (at least for the first season) it just kept getting better.

Oh shit, Mars symmetry, catch it!

Did anyone else see Demons last night? I did cos it was after the FA Cup match, can't find any other discussion of this programme. Philip Glenister with a US accent, a decision that weighs things down before a ball's been kicked. The protagonist is attractive though which makes a change.

US version comes back this month right?! whoo

Was the second season of the UK version ever shown or available on DVD in the US?

wow, they played traffic sound on tonight's episode. that was surprising. also, apparently, the action.

i mean ON THE US one, which doesn't have its own thread.

Baby detective gets dreem assignment, guarding Sebastian Grace, who, along with the Electric Insects, ride Greatest Hit, "The Last Planet I Kissed." (Time traveler to babyface: "He'll be a has-been by 1975," but the kid don't care.) Great song, in a way Tim Curry would have envied, and we also get original "Supersonic Rocket Ship" and original "Starman" (could do without that one)

US version cancelled.

So glad I never watched the US version... Here's how it ended (reposted from http://sepinwall.blogspot.com/2009/04/life-on-mars-life-is-rock-space-oddity.html )

So... where to begin? I guess with a quick recap of the UK finale for those who didn't see it, just to point out how strangely and awfully the US ending went wrong.

In the last episode of "Life on Mars" UK, Sam is caught in an ambush with the rest of Gene's team when he suddenly wakes up back in the present. He's told it was all some kind of elaborate coma fantasy, and sees that several figures from that fantasy (notably the Internal Affairs cop trying to bring down Gene) were based, "Wizard of Oz"-style, on people from the hospital. But after being back in his old life for a while, Sam discovers that he doesn't fit in, that he can't really feel anything, that he has no emotional connection to the 21st century anymore. And so -- as the full version of the Bowie song plays, just like it did in the pilot -- he goes up onto the roof of a tall building, jumps off, and...

...finds himself back in 1973, saving Gene, Ray and the others from the bad guys and committed to spending the rest of his existence in this weird place, not caring if it was a fantasy, or Purgatory, or something else entirely.

That is an ending. Whatever problems I may have had with the original show (which, like the remake, sometimes trended too closely to being an actual '70s cop show instead of a pastiche of one), I will always love it for that last episode.

I knew the American producers had a different take on the "mythology" of where/when their Sam was. I wasn't expecting a rehash of the original finale (though, based on the reaction this morning of several disgruntled "Life on Mars" USA fans whom I told about the old ending, they might have been better off copying it wholesale). But I also wasn't expecting anything as dumb and/or as insulting to the viewer as the ending we got.

The short version, if you didn't watch and are just curious how it ended: After a kidnapping case that sees Gene killing Sam's dad to save adult Sam's life, Sam more or less told his mom who he was, Annie (who figured out where Sam was in time to save him) got a promotion to detective, and Sam decided that he was sent back in time to meet and fall in love with Annie, and that he didn't care about ever going back to 2008, at which point he...

...finds himself several decades into our future, waking up from two years of hibernation on a NASA spaceship heading for Mars. He's not a cop from 2008 at all. That's just a fantasy cooked up by the ship's computer to keep his mind occupied during the travel (the astronaut version of Ray, sadly mustache-free, selected an elaborate island sex dream), and the trip back to 1973 was a glitch in the system. "Gene Hunt" is not the name of a person, but the mission they're on to find out if there was ever life on Mars, and Harvey Keitel is on board as Major Tom, astronaut Sam's dad.

Words fail me.

It's one thing to say that 1973 wasn't real, or even that the present-day material wasn't real (as the UK finale briefly suggested in a head-fake to the audience), but to say that neither was real? That none of what the viewer watched for these 17 episodes mattered? That it was all a very literal joke on the series' title?

Well, if I was someone who had actually ridden this particular train from beginning to end, sad that the ratings weren't strong enough to keep the show around, I would be furious about this. As it was, I was pretty mad that I stayed up after "Lost" just to watch it.

And the really maddening thing is that, until the idiotic, obnoxious twist ending, the finale was actually very good. I have to credit some of its power to the extensive use of Elton John's "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters" -- like the original finale's use of Bowie on the rooftop, it gave scenes like Sam and Annie's kiss, or even Annie's unlikely promotion, some real weight. And the scene where we see Sam in the present-day, reading "Gulliver's Travels" to an old woman whom we assume to be his mom (as he promised her in 1973), but who turns out to be Annie, was lovely, even if it wound up mattering not at all in the grand scheme of things.

I'd like to think that this was a case of the writers being so frustrated with the cancellation that they were venting their anger at ABC with this stupid ending, but based on how early and often we saw the miniature Mars Rover, I have to assume this was their plan all along, which... wow. Just wow. Even the final shot, of 1973 Gene's leg preparing to step onto the Mars surface, seems less an attempt to give this silly explanation some ambiguity than it feels like someone's idea of a memorable closing image, meaning be damned.

I'm mad. How about you?

Haha, OMG, that is bonkers. I think I want to watch the US version now.

I really wanted to give this show a chance (the US), but it was worse than watching a bad episode of SWAT.

"Hey, copper, let me go. 'Happy Days' is on."
"Why, I'll give you something to sit on!"
"Wait! You're going off on this guy worse than the Viet Cong."

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6e/Back_to_Reality_(Red_Dwarf).jpg

^ back next week! is there a thread yet?

btw, the UK ending of LoM was pish as well.

I'll miss this show

(xpost) I hated the ending of the UK version as well.
Series 2 of "Ashes to Ashes" is on soon
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ashestoashes/index.shtml
(^^^ trailer possibly only viewable to UKers)
I've not seen a campier fight since Adam West was in Batman...

btw, the UK ending of LoM was pish as well.

So wrong. I think it is one of my favorite series endings.

The first episode of the US version was so awful I never watched again, but now I almost wish I would have seen this last episode because it sounds so mind-bogglingly absurd.

I loved the original UK ending: suicide as soaring triumph! You don't get that very often.

but everything else was bollocks (see upthread for full "this is bollocks" spleen-venting)! Then they invented Ashes to Ashes!

I would have seen this last episode because it sounds so mind-bogglingly absurd.

Just as absurd: the notion that the crew demographics of the first manned mission to Mars in 2035 would be identical to the departmental demographics of a police precinct in 1973. I had a harder time believing that the first mission to Mars will be crewed by a bunch of white Americans than I did believing that Sam's experiences were all a "neural stim."

Yeah. Lame.

They showed the finale of the US remake last night on UK TV. OMG unbelievably awful.

I actually liked the series up to the last 15 minutes - although I never watched the UK version so I don't know how it compared to that.

"It was all a dream!" oh fuck off

Was "it was all a dream" worse than making it about astronauts GOING TO MARS?

Netflixed the first DVD, thought it was moralistic and reductive -- should I bother with the rest?

anyone else still watching ashes to ashes?

intrigued by the last 2 eps having the same bit where the main character gets a 3 second close up, stare down the camera lens, lights dimmed 'Life on Mars' feintly playing thing. eerie.

There's an Ashes to Ashes thread where I appear to be the only Britisher still watching. Come join me! : Fire up the Quattro! Ashes To Ashes happens

so do i bother with the UK version if ive already watched the full us run?

(btw the us version is awesome and you haters are all maniacs)

I enjoyed the US Life on Mars too! But yeah, watch the UK original - at least the first two or three episodes, and if you like what you see, the whole series.

Didn't care too much for Ashes to Ashes for most of the run, but loved the closing episodes. The series finale knocked my socks off.

Apparently there's a Russian version of Life On Mars called DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppYNNR37cGk

Were they allowed to listen to Pink Floyd in 70s Russia?