"Life (or death?) on Mars:" You make the call

The floor's now open for debate: Will ABC's Americanization of "Life on Mars" be any good?

Herewith, the evidence:

Pro: It's based on a cool BBC series, about a contemporary Manchester detective working on a case, who gets smacked by a car and wakes up in 1973, where there's none of the nifty CSI-type technology to solve crimes, and all the cops there think they're in an episode of "Starsky & Hutch," playing rough games of bad cop/worse cop with suspects.

(Stars of the British version and what passes for a cool car in England.)

Con: About the only Americanization of a British series that has worked this decade is "The Office." (This is bad news for a scad of new shows, of which many, as we've previously noted, are carbon copies of overseas successes.)

Pro: ABC Entertainment president Stephen McPherson calls the project a "passion" of his. He never called "Cavemen" a passion.

Con: It's been through a particularly difficult birthing process - David E. Kelley left the show after shooting a pilot (which is being completely reshot), and there've been wholesale casting changes since then, as well.

"I'm the only survivor from the original pilot," opined Jason O'Mara, who stars as Sam Tyler, the time-traveling - or comatose, or just plain crazy - cop, at the show's session at summer TV Press Tour in Beverly Hills. "Quite the bit of Irish luck.

"It can be a little weird," O'Mara concedes of being the last man standing. "I was sad to see that I wasn't going to be working with those guys, but at same time I understood the decision."

Pro: Michael Imperioli ("The Sopranos") has joined the cast. "I definitely was being picky," Imperioli says of selecting roles after getting whacked by Tony. "It's a hard act to follow. You want something juicy and different."

Con: Imperioli is so picky that he appeared in the treacly sap-fest "Mitch Albom's For One More Day."

Pro: The new show runners are Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec, who worked on "Alias."

Con: The last show they worked on was - ulp - "October Road." (This should almost count as two cons.)

Pro: Appelbaum cops to being a "huge fan" of the British series, and that the main difference they've brought to Kelley's version is moving the story from Los Angeles to New York, which makes more sense, since they're out to capture the grungy nature of the original series and the bad-ass cops. The casting changes were made, likewise, to reflect worm-riddled Big Apple sensibilities in the actors over a laid-back, City-of-Angels gestalt.

"There are a lot of similarities (with 1973 and) where we are now," says Appelbaum. "We were in a war we were trying to get out of. We had an unpopular president. Gas prices were an issue. A war we were trying to get out of. We're so excited to be able to explore all this on the show, this specific, tumultuous time."

Con: The British series wrapped up its tricky narrative in a mere 16 episodes. (Though a spin-off show sporting another title borrowed from a David Bowie song, "Ashes to Ashes," is in the works.) American series tend not to have the luxury of being so close-ended - in order to be profitable, it'll have to go on for at least four seasons.

Pro: Appelbaum and Nemec understand this and have applied themselves to resolving that problem. For example, in the British version, the detective's partner was kidnapped in the first episode, and returning to the present day to rescue her gave the show a lot of urgency. Appelbaum acknowledges that that would hardly fly over years of episodes.

"In the pilot, we have a similar construct, but we resolve that sooner in the show rather than later," he says. "There will be dispatches from 2008 that will be reaching Sam. We resolve the peril early, because you need to be investing in his life in 1973."

Appelbaum also seems to have a good take on dealing with the mythology that served as the underpinning of the original series. "It's a question of playing it down and actually expanding the mythology," he explains. "We called the creators (of the original) and asked permission to change the mythology. In that series, Sam had three options - he had lost his mind, he was in a coma, or he had actually time-traveled. It turned out he was in a coma, and to do a long-running series where he's in a coma felt unsatisfying.

"For us there's many, many more options," he continues. "In the second episode, he comes up with 13 options [explaining his plight] - well, 12 options and a question mark, the one option he hasn't considered yet and that's the one that scares him most of all."

"Having worked on 'Alias,' we know the pitfalls of extending this mythological storyline," Appelbaum continues. "A lot of people say this, but we know exactly where this is all going."

Con: How could they, really? The pilot hasn't even been reshot yet, and the series is scheduled to debut on Thursday, Oct. 9.

So what do you think? Does "Life on Mars" sound promising, or will it be an otherworldly tank job?