About.com Rating

Cast:

• Jason O'Mara ... Detective Sam Tyler
• Harvey Keitel ... Lieutenant Gene Hunt
• Michael Imperioli ... Detective Ray Carling
• Gretchen Mol ... Annie Norris
• Jonathan Murphy ... Detective Chris Skelton
• Austin Basis ... Willy Kramer
• Michael Bertolini ... Colin Raimes
• Lisa Bonet ... Maya Daniels

Directed by Gary Fleder (Kiss the Girls, October Road). Developed and teleplay by Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec & Scott Rosenberg (October Road), based on the UK series created by Mathew Graham & Tony Jordan & Ashley Pharoah.

Premiered Oct. 9, 2008 on ABC. Click here for an image gallery.

Plot Summary

Sam Tyler (Jason O'Mara, In Justice) is a New York City detective who's just nabbed a bad guy named Raimes (Michael Bertolini) who kidnaps young women and imprisons them for 30 hours before brutally killing them. But Raimes fools Tyler with a false alibi long enough to grab Sam's partner Maya (Lisa Bonet), with whom Sam has been secretly having a relationship.

Desperate to track down Raimes, Sam is suddenly mowed down by a speeding car. When he wakes up, things seem strange: he's on the street where he was hit, but the buildings are different, there's a '70s sports car with his name on the title parked nearby instead of his SUV, and the real kicker comes when he looks up to see the gleaming World Trade towers looming over him.

Gradually Sam pieces together what seems to be going on: the Detective Sam Tyler he's become in 1973 is a transfer from upstate working in the same police precinct, the 125, but with a decidedly different crew and a very different cop sensibility from 2008.

The squad includes baby-faced detective Chris (Jonathan Murphy, October Road), wise-cracking Ray (Michael Imperioli, The Sopranos), and neglected police woman Annie (Gretchen Mol, Girl 6, Donnie Brasco), led by the gruff Lt. Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel). The detectives are on the trail of a killer with an M.O. remarkably similar to his 2008 perp, Raimes.

Sam becomes convinced he's lying comatose in 2008 and has trapped himself in a delusional version of the past. Sam throws himself into solving the 1973 case, hoping this will free him so he can save Maya in the present.

Evoking an Atmosphere

The real star of "Out Here in the Fields," the premiere episode of Life on Mars, is the look of the show itself. Faced with the challenge of evoking a 1973 that feels palpably different from 2008, the creators have recreated the past not just through period costumes and props but through sheer atmosphere. The lighting, cinematography, and direction seamlessly craft a world designed to make us feel we've been drawn into the past along with Sam.

Particularly effective is the color mixing: 2008 is blue, slick, and modern, while 1973 is burnished with a slightly yellow feel, like those old crank-and-peel Polaroids. Costuming and set direction in muted browns and greens adds to the difference in tone, and is part of the package that includes everything from wide ties and collars to long hair and sideburns to actor's business -- it's very interesting to consider how startling it is to see Ray smoking in the autopsy room.

The team that developed the show have some experience in evoking a nostalgic atmosphere, having worked together previously on last year's much-loved but canceled October Road. Here they take a concept that could be played entirely for cheap laughs -- look how goofy those 1970s cats are! -- and instead evoke a powerful sense of strangeness and resonance, as if Sam had been transported to another world were everything is eerily almost, but not quite, the same as Earth.

Not Just an Import

That approach carries over into the earliest scenes set in the past. When Sam looks in the Starsky & Hutch-mobile that's apparently his 1973 ride and sees an eight-track (of the same album he'd been listening to on his iPod in 2008, David Bowie's Hunky Dory containing the track that provides the series's title, "Life on Mars?"), it might bring a smile to those who lived through the time, but the overriding feel is one of potent surrealism.

Life on Mars is based on the acclaimed BBC series of the same name, starring John Simm (who recently played the Master on Doctor Who); a well-regarded spin-off, Ashes to Ashes, is still being produced in Britain. The stateside version has ported over a number of key elements, most notably the mixing of science fiction and police procedural, the recurring problems deriving from stark differences in police culture between past and present, the sidelining of female police officers, and the uncertainty of Sam's status (is he time traveling? Experiencing delusions in a coma? Dead?). The American Life on Mars, however, has striven to erect these elements in the 1970s New York we already know from dozens of movies and cops shows, generating a palpable sense of "authenticity" that has nothing to do with how historically accurate it is.

Creating a Character

A major contribution to this authenticity is the (late) casting of Harvey Keitel as Lt. Hunt. The blunt-edged Hunt is a role that tough-guy veteran Keitel could play in his sleep, but Keitel has clearly invested himself deeply in creating not just a shape but a person. He sells his speech to Sam ("When my time is done they will say, 'He has been here'") not just through mannerism but by making manifest a man who is elementally of his times.

By comparison, Jason O'Mara as Sam makes a more muted impression, which is fine for a series lead: he can't pull out all the stops in the premiere or there'll be nothing to be curious about. O'Mara does give us the panicky frustration Sam experiences from being trapped and unable to help his girlfriend, and at other times his wry amusement at his groovy surroundings signals a deliberate effort at self-protecting detachment that's already started to soften by the end of the first episode.

It remains to be seen whether the remarkable sense of submersion in the past (thankfully not overly reliant, in contrast to most nostalgia-comedy movies, on a soundtrack cherry-picked from period pop charts) can be sustained throughout the series. But on the evidence of the premiere, Life on Mars is one of the strongest and most effective shows of the season.