Ashes to Ashes

[mmcirvin]

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.

Comments

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I've only watched the start of "Ashes to Ashes," to the part where Keeley Hawes makes love to Hunt's Audi Quattro, but A) you're right, and B) I'm with the writers on this one-- Sam Tyler's a great character even when he's a pile of sanctimony, but Gene Hunt is clearly the heart of Life On Mars, and I can't blame them for exploding his proportions in A2A. I bet it tones down a good bit for the remainder of Ashes, though-- don't judge a show by its premiere-- it takes at least two episodes. I think they just wanted to summon some Miami Vice nostalgia to get people watching the show.

As a point of fact, I am, this very minute, finally watching the LoM finale, which I had rationed until this point. I hope there's a decent replacement in A2A for the great Sam/Annie thing. Annie and even the junior DCs gave Sam a way to encourage progressive justice without directly butting heads with Gene Hunt.

Also, while you're no doubt right about the character, they established even her modern character as a woman who as a critic of the cops, and even in real life, such a person might completely lose it in the face of Gene Hunt, the sort of cop who never met a rule book and still finds justice.

Anyway, back to Mars.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Wow, that was confusing, yet satisfying.