Ashes to Ashes

I greatly enjoyed Life on Mars, but the pilot for the sequel series (which is all I've seen so far) is seriously disappointing and also troubling. The interesting twist, which I like, is that the protagonist is a police psychologist familiar with Sam Tyler's case, so when she falls into 1981, she comes in already knowing about as much as we do about what's happened to her.

The not-interesting twist is that apparently they couldn't think of anything better to do with a female lead than to make her an irritating, tyrannical figure, who doesn't seem to realize that you can't convince people (even people you're hallucinating) of hard-to-believe propositions by simply bellowing them; and to then spend most of the first episode humiliating her and putting her into suggestive poses while she's dressed as a prostitute. Meanwhile, the writers' apparent worship of Gene Hunt gets blown up to comically absurd proportions, and all the various gimmicks of Life on Mars get trotted out again with less interesting execution. Everything's bigger, louder, more cartoonish.

John Simm is greatly missed. I don't think I realized how central his performance was to making the show work until now.