Life on Mars US remake photos, hooray!
Some new publicity photos have surfaced via the Daily Mail showing the new vision for the US remake of Life on Mars, a cop drama with a time travel twist. The show, well-acclaimed in Britain and in the US, is about detective Sam Tyler, a no-nonsense, by-the-book cop from the present day who is in a car accident and wakes up in 1973. Sam must cope with the social realities of a different decade, particularly his violent and bigoted boss Gene Hunt. Sam investigates cases with Gene, all the while secretly searching for answers and a way back home.
Although the show wrapped up last year and its sequel series, Ashes to Ashes, is already in full swing, the American remake is just getting started. Or rather, the second American remake is. The first version of the pilot, featuring Jason O'Mara as Sam Tyler, Colm Meaney as Gene Hunt, and Rachel Lefevre as Sam's love interest Annie Cartwright, leaked to the internet some time ago and reaction was quite negative. With good reason, too. O'Mara hasn't the charisma to match John Simm's excellent portrayal of Sam in the original, Annie was a completely different character, and Gene Hunt, whose brutality and chauvinism were central to the character, had been softened up significantly and was more playful than hostile toward Sam. The relationship between Sam and Gene is the soul of the show, and getting it wrong ruins the whole project.
Thankfully, the remake of the pilot already looks worlds better. Showrunner David E Kelley has been replaced by a trio of fresh blood. And while O'Mara remains as Sam, veteran actor Harvey Keitel has been cast as the new Gene hunt. Keitel will certainly make an interesting Gene, much closer to the spirit of the original character but two decades older than Philip Glennister's version. What this means to the tone of the show I am unsure, but this is almost certainly a vast improvement to the pilot. Meanwhile, Gretchen Mol has been cast in the role of Annie, and from the picture it seems that they will be playing it much closer to the UK version that Kelley's first pilot did. Additionally, the new pilot features the return of two secondary characters who were cut from the first pilot. Ray Carling, Gene's right hand men, will be played by Michael Imperioli, and rookie detective Chris Skelton by Jonathan Murphy. The pilot suffered greatly for lack of two characters and seeing them back is great news for the show.
I highly recommend that before this series begins, you check out the original UK version, although sadly the DVDs are not available in the US. I'm not quite sure why that is, it might have something to do with rights issues involving the many popular songs of the seventies that appear in the show, obviously including David Bowie's song "Life on Mars." Anyhow, hopefully BBC America will re-run the original Life on Mars in preparation for this show's premiere on ABC October 9.
