After The Wire perfected a new urban social realism, and CSI (and its offshoots) took Law and Order’s procedural drama to absurd technical heights, the cop show had to get a new angle. The answer: Police the realm of the spirit and cast a non-American English-speaking actor as a brainy detective with a life-changing problem and no easy love interest, and watch him struggle to make sense of life and of time. This is the strategy taken by both Life and Life on Mars.
The past week saw two metaphysical detective dramas return. After a seven-week break in its second season, Life’s Zen detective Charlie Crews resumed unraveling why he’d been framed for a triple murder (NBC, Wed., 8/9c). After an out-of-order episode aired last week, Life on Mars (ABC, Wed., 10/9c) finally delivered the belated conclusion to its mid-November mid-season cliffhanger and brought its contemporary cop, Sam Tyler, a step closer to figuring out the nature of reality-and why he’s stuck in 1973.
Life is the more straightforward of the two. Los Angeles detective Charlie Crews (played cucumber-cool by London’s Damian Lewis) spent twelve years in prison for allegedly killing his business partner and his wife and son. By the time DNA evidence exonerated him, his friends and family had turned against him, and he’d been brutalized by inmates with grudges against the police, fallen hopelessly behind on technological matters, and found comfort in Zen Buddhism. Crews is slowly piecing together why he was set up as a killer, sporadically pining for his since-remarried ex-wife, and gingerly dealing with his partner-in-policework Dani Reese (The L Word’s Sarah Shahi), whose no-longer secret boyfriend is their captain and whose father is connected to the set-up. Zen gives Crews a wealth of koans to use as ambiguous comebacks—and a sense of peace and interconnectedness that keeps Crews calm as he faces the fact that he’s been screwed out of life (which his $50 million settlement doesn’t nearly make up for.)
Based on a British series of the same Bowie-inspired name, the David E. Kelley-initiated Life on Mars (currently helmed by Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec, and Scott Rosenberg, the trio behind the short-lived but watchable writer-can’t-go-home-again drama October Road) has a lot to live up to. Dubliner Jason O’Mara—he’ll pass for The Wire’s Sheffield-Irish Dominic West if you squint—plays Sam Tyler. A detective with New York’s fictitious 125th Precinct, Tyler was hit by a car when rushing to investigate a case. When he gets up, he’s still Sam Tyler of the 125th, but it’s 1973. Is he in a coma in 2008 dreaming that it’s 1973, or does his head injury just make him think so? Is something even stranger going on, or is this just how strange life is anyway?
The coma explanation initially seems most likely; that turned out to be the truth in the BBC version, from which the ABC show is already diverging. Within that framework, Tyler goes about his police duties as he tries to get back to 2008 by learning whatever life lessons or enacting any time-traveling plot-changes the universe is demanding of him. He dreams of his 2008 love and fellow detective, Maya (Lisa Bonet)—we assume the allusion to the Hindu concept of maya as a veiling, illusory reality is intentional—while maintaining a careful distance with his 1973 animas, a pioneering lady cop who serves as his confidant (Gretchen Mol) and a sagely hippie neighbor who opens his mind (Tanya Fischer). He encounters his parents, his young self, future mentors and criminals, real or products of his mind.
1973’s primitive technology is a continual source of amusement for Tyler; 1973’s police force, less so. Michael Imperioli plays a detective who thinks Tyler stole a promotion that should have been his. Harvey Keitel, in the casting coup of the century, nearly reprises his Bad Lieutenant role by playing the hard-drinking, suspect-beating station captain. If the show is largely missing the opportunity to revisit the crime-infested, recessionary New York that may be the future, it balances an infatuation of the style of 1973 (in terms of both visible fashion and a late-hippie aura of freedom) with a rear-view moral righteousness that rarely exceeds its place. Sam Tyler is the voice of progress and tolerance, yet he’s painfully aware that 2008 is little better than 1973. When he dusts himself off after being hit by that car, he barely registers that the housing projects that had surrounded him have been replaced by rubble and by billboards announcing that new apartments will be available on the site in 1974; it’s only when he sees the World Trade Center in the distance that he begins to understand the full magnitude of what’s happened. He rails against his colleagues’ treatment of women, gays, minorities and anti-war protesters; but when he speaks against the war in Vietnam, he also means the war in Iraq, and he has to hint to 1973 of horrors yet to come.
Life is, unsurprisingly, a bit more detached: the closest we get to a sociopolitical history is watching Crews’s former cellmate, pension-raiding ex-CEO Ted Early (Adam Arkin) humbly teaching business school and managing Crews’s money during a recession.
Next week, both shows deal with crimes against musicians and try to figure out what the Russians have to do with their heroes’mysteries. We’ll be hoping that Life on Mars, with all its shadow-dwelling robots and shadowy conspiracies, isn’t going to start emulating Lost and its nonsensical twists, but will continue probing inner and outer realities; and that Life will more fully communicate its Zen mindfulness as its arrow approaches its bullseye. A good detective or two of the human experience might be just what we need.