His mind on his investigation, NYPD homicide detective Sam Tyler steps from his jeep into the street and is knocked skyward by a passing car. When he left the earth, David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” was on satellite radio. When he landed, it was coming from the eight-track of a ‘70s muscle car.
And that’s not the only transition faced by Tyler. He awakens in 1973, but at the same age he was in 2008, with the same name and the same job—just transposed backward in time to an era whose manners, mores and style have come to be as intriguing, distant and different from nowadays as Regency England. That’s the premise of the ABC series “Life on Mars.” The complete series is out now on DVD.
Based on a British program of the same name, “Life on Mars” touches on conundrums of time travel while giving broad hints in episode one that Tyler could be in a coma, living out an alternate reality. If so, it’s not a hallucination or a dream as such things are normally understood. There is a link between the case he was working on in ‘08 and some of the characters he encounters in ‘73.
What’s weak about “Life on Mars” is Tyler’s ability to be accepted—even provisionally—by his colleagues at the precinct. Imagine if the new guy in your workplace announced in great agitation that he hailed from 34 years in the future! But the show’s writers help suspend disbelief by focusing on the humor in the gap between then and now. When Tyler says, “I need my cell,” a cop replies, “You need to sell what?” Unthinking sexism was prevalent as smoking. The Miranda ruling was only a rumor at the precinct level.
Tyler makes the point that he was only four in 1973, a clue to the primary target audience of “Life on Mars,” a generation too young to have anything but the dimmest memory of Afros, rotary phones, manual typewriters and Kojak cop cars topped with single red bubble lights. Rummaging around a record store, Tyler tries to explain that vinyl would be replaced by CDs and then by digital downloads, which sounded,,, worse than vinyl. “Life on Mars” is tinted in nostalgia for a time that seems more colorful than now, paced to the beat of the Who, Mott the Hoople and the Stones. Sam Tyler may be lost in time, on a journey home without a road map, stranded in a land that is flawed, fascinating and far away.
