Critic, criticize thyself II

Today, we're eschewing dumping on everything else in the Television landscape and devoting our energies to dumping on my reviews which appeared in today's paper. This entry: ABC's "Life on Mars:"

*

Early in tonight's premiere of "Life on Mars," Sam Tyler (Jason O'Mara), a contemporary Manhattan police detective racing to the apartment of a suspect who has abducted his partner and girlfriend, is hit by a car - and comes to, finding himself in 1973. He gazes upward, and beholds the Twin Towers still standing, gleaming in the sunlight.

So now the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 are fodder for time-travel yarns. How far we've come.

"Life on Mars" was an ingenious, self-contained British series that solved all its mysteries in 16 episodes (a spinoff sporting the title of another David Bowie song, "Ashes to Ashes," followed). In America, of course, 16 episodes isn't even an entire season. So obviously, there'll be some busking when it comes to explaining why Sam has become an unwilling time traveler.

In the meantime, he must make sense of the culture shock of '70s mores. Police brutality is a casual pastime. Cell phones don't yet exist, he's a little slow on the uptake to realize. And police forensics are primitive if they exist at all.

His new colleagues are decidedly old-school. His boss, Lt. Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel), keeps a flask close by and punches first, asking questions later, if at all. Detective Ray Carling (Michael Imperioli) is a crass, lame jokester ("He's crazier than a fruitbat at a cranberry convention," he says of Tyler) with a mustache most would associate with the Village People. Annie Norris (Gretchen Mol), of the Bureau of Police Women, knows better than to let on that she's smarter than the louts she works with.

Tyler's first case in the mean streets of 1973 has eerie parallels to the one he was working in 2008, which is fortunate, because his colleagues think him erratic due to his outbursts about, well, being from the year 2008. That he's able to knit together evidence to catch the perpetrator redeems him, at least temporarily.

The British version, despite Sam's urgency to return to the present and rescue his partner, had an irresistibly larky energy - it parodied tough-guy cop shows like "Starsky & Hutch." This American version has gone through a torturous birthing process (the first incarnation, by "Boston Legal's" David E. Kelley, was scrapped and largely recast), which might account for its relative paucity of fun (though it is fairly faithful in its visual sensibility, a mélange of grungy yellows and browns).

(Oddly enough, it's easier to find photos from this scrapped David E. Kelley version online than it is to find some for the new show.)

Tonight's episode prominently features a lot of pop music from the era. The British version may have done so, as well (certainly, it used the Bowie song), but it had such an inventive drive that that wasn't the only aspect of the show you recalled after watching it.

You were hooked after one episode of the British series. After tonight's not-bad/not-great episode, it's hard to say whether viewers will have been intrigued enough to return.

*

I once counseled a friend who was up for a job that I had left not to take it - he was working for a weekly newspaper, and was particularly gifted at the nearly lost art of long, thoughtful reviews that allowed him to comment on peripherally related pop-culture and social phenomena; the job he was up for would squelch that talent. In the end, he stayed at his old job and emerged as a Pultizer finalist for stuff he wrote after declining the job offer.

"Life on Mars" is a show that, in the hands of a good essayist, merits one of those kitchen-sink-type of reviews. There's so much to discuss - the great British series upon which it is based and whether its concept is sustainable beyond a handful of episodes; where the Americanization has the best chance of approximating the British version (aping the '70s cop-show cliché); the era the show portrays and ABC's incarnation's debt to "Mad Men" in romanticizing and damning our recent past ("Mad Men" luxuriates in its fashion and production design, while this show uses them as visual punchlines); an expanded discussion on exploiting 9/11 for commercial purposes and, of course, whether the show itself is any good.

That last point, unfortunately, provides the least fodder for discussion, because only one episode was made available for review, due, perhaps, to the incessant retooling. So maybe a think piece on the show would only result in so much mental masturbation since there's precious little insight to offer viewers as to what ABC has allowed critics to see. Still, this show would've provided a fount of opinion. This review is just meat and potatoes, only the meat's fairly gristly and the potatoes have no seasoning.

- "Life on Mars:" 10 tonight; ABC Channel 7.