pubs
The US Life on Mars looks… exactly like the UK version, except with a ridiculous glitzy CSI TV-cop idea of modern-day policework. Even the same title sequence. It’s a little weird.
Good casting, anyway. Mostly. The new Sam Tyler is… hmm. Colm Meaney is always great, though.
Not even the biggest fan of the original show; though a good premise and a fantastic cast and production, it kind of squandered its potential. I wonder what they’ll do with the US show, in light of the genre serial craze. They’ll certainly have to create a lot more material.
The UK version’s vision of the present seemed a bit unrealistically glitzy too, maybe because they were trying so hard to draw a contrast with 1973.
The trailer’s trying very hard to be comprehensible to dim people, though I like how they also made it slightly period.
Yes, the trailer itself is amazingly duh. I think the biggest difference may be in budget. Though the modern-day UK department was very white-collar, it seemed… well, plausible. The US version seems to imply that modern police stations include state-of-the-art war rooms.
That is a point, though. The UK version seems to be about class as much as anything, with the present as more refined and upper-class and the past more working-class. Take out the time travel mystery, and you’ve got a familiar story template. It even kind of follows familiar literary values, in that the proletariat, though rough in its ways, tends to show real wisdom gathered from its real life experiences.
How often is Gene Hunt portrayed as the only one who really knows what’s going on? Though Sam Tyler may well have a good point, he often bumbles by trying to impose his values and methods where they don’t really apply.
Huh.
What I meant is that the UK production didn’t have money to draw much contrast beyond starched white shirts and stark, clean office spaces. The budget to a David E. Kelley version allows the production to drown in Hollywood bizarreness.
I think I’m beginning to understand now why the time travel mystery seemed sidelined; it was a total macguffin. The point was never what was going on with Sam Tyler; it was the class thing. Which also explains why the show (and its sequel/spin-off) are more fascinated with Gene Hunt than Sam Tyler.
Hum. No wonder it bored me. Though positioned as a modern character piece, it’s just an old-fashioned parable. One that, from a modern Sam Tyleresque perspective, I would assume more or less discredited. Which I guess explains why Matthew Graham felt he had to mine the not-so-distant past…
Considering that class is so much less of a cultural issue in the US (at least nominally), I wonder if the US version will in fact take a different approach to the narrative and premise.