It’s fall; what better time to retreat into the house and melt your brain and grow your ass at the same time? As you may know, the new show Life on Mars is a remake of a perfectly good British show that won a bunch of awards and crap. Even though it is in the same language, American TV executives had to steal it and translate it from British language to Amurican. I find this to be a brilliant money-making scheme. I’m going to rebuild the Segway, paint it purple, add an espresso machine, and call it the Transitshun. I’ll make MILLYUNS.
To give you a little background, the show is about a detective who gets bonked by a car in 2008 and wakes up in 1973. We’re not given much more explanation than that, because, you see, it is a mystery. The show is part standard police procedural, where cops run around solving shit (or not), and partly the detective, named Sam Tyler, trying to figure out why he is in 1973 and he pines for his 2008 girlfriend, who is played by Denise Huxtable. (They are even hiding her behind furniture a la The Cosby Show pregnancy, because lo these 19 years later, The Bonnet is pregnant again!) Because of the time travel, there is also a science fiction aspect to the show, where Tyler has visions of 2008 and weird little robots that resemble the Mars landers plague him (there are allusions to the Mars landing as well, since it was historically current).
Anyway, new Life on Mars. The first episode was a somewhat disjointed mess, with Tyler being thrown back into time and spending most of the episode going WTFBBQ, and trying to integrate into his new police department and apartment. The cops there are told he’s a transfer, which makes his arrival more plausible, and prevents Tyler from having to pretend he’s someone he’s “been all along.” I enjoyed Freaky Friday back in the day (mmm, beetloaf), but I’m glad they didn’t go that route. I watched the second episode this morning, and I think I’m going to stick with it, although there are some hinky parts that are bothering me.
Because it is set in a roughy-toughy New York police precinct in 1973, it is important for the viewer to know that the “real” cops, who are all men (more on this in a minute), are very dirty and do not follow approved procedures. Your first hint anvil that this is a sketchy place manned by sketchy mans is that Harvey Keitel is the boss! Well, that settles that. If they couldn’t have gotten Keitel for the role, they could have just hung a picture of him on the wall for a similar effect. But of course it is fun watching him act his face off. He punches people and calls his drawer-of-illegal-crap-to-pin-on-recalcitrant-perps “Aladdin’s Cave.” Keitel swigs out of his flask and puts his shoes up on the desk, and spends what seems like half of the second episode beating the poo poo out of Tyler. What’s not to enjoy? After his time travel mystery, this is conflict number two for Detective Tyler: having to work with a den of rogues who majored in evidence tampering and minored in gleeful face-kickery.
So Detective Tyler spends a lot of time saying, “You can’t DOOO that!” and “This are a crime scene!” while the other cops look at him blankly or like he’s simple. Tyler is also hampered, of course, by a lack of technology. He boggles when he hears that they will get the results back from the lab “really fast now! Only two weeks!”
Unfortunately, this is the end of his boggling and protesting. I feel conflicted yet fascinated by the female characters on the show. Of course, they are held to the yardstick of 1973 standards (or what the writers imagine 1973 was like), and this was well before Cagney and Lacey. There is a “lady police squad,” who is represented by Officer Norris, played by the pretty, blonde Gretchen Mol. In the first episode, Officer Norris tells Tyler that her job as a lady cop is to rescue kitties and calm down hysterical girlfriends.
I want Officer Norris to be a prototypical feminist in the series, and in a way she is. The cops call her “No-Nuts Norris” and she accepts that she is given almost nothing to do, despite the fact that she has a college degree and a quick mind. Tyler calls on her for help in the first episode in one of those police pow-wows where everyone gets assigned leads and people share information (can you tell I don’t watch a lot of police shows?) and the male cops look at Tyler like he just declared that he wants to make sweet love to Spiro Agnew, and Officer Norris looks horrified and embarrassed to be called out. This is the only moment in the two shows so far that a female character has been shown as complicit to her circumstances, which I think is actually pretty realistic.
However, Officer Norris still shows up for work every day. She is still there, plugging away, a fictional representation of all the ordinary women who broke boundaries back in the day. It irks me that in episode two she is shown tittering with another boss cop guy from brass or somewhere. Tyler is interested and the viewer knows at that moment that Officer Norris will be the love interest that will replace his 2008 girlfriend, and there will be conflicts over the triangle, pushing her from the role of capable, if constrained, cop, to sexual tension and a prize for the main character. What I really want is for Officer Norris to work with Tyler to solve cases and such, even if it’s on the DL.
(I had this vision of Norris fleeing the force and marrying the cop she was talking to, and really, who could blame her? What would her future be like? Years of being called No-Nuts while the cops around her get promoted up and the respect they deserve?)
It all makes the subtext of the show complicated, and at least as interesting as the plot itself. The writers kind of hit you over the head with how “backward” everyone was in Ye Olde 1970s, with Detective Tyler in the center of it all, taking it all in. It’s fun to compare and contrast the cop shows that were made in the 1970s, which in many ways Life on Mars strongly resembles; you do have dudes running around shooting at each other, climbing fences in skeezy alleys, and kicking aforementioned faces. (This is FUN to watch. I kind of feel like I’m getting away with something even more deliciously mindless that usual.)
The difference is this overlay of self-consciousness about how bad the time was for people, and it results in a tediously moralizing tone from the script. The squad chases a perp through the park. Detective Tyler runs the fastest because he is hella fit and does not smoke, because this is a virtue in 2008. They catch up to the perp and Keitel pushes him into the water (“HEY! You can’t DOOO that!”). None of the other cops can swim, of course, because they are just not as good as Tyler, so Tyler must rescue the perp from drowning. You get the impression that even if Tyler wasn’t there, and the perp wouldn’t have been rescued, they would have called it a job well done and nicked off to the bar.
What’s missing from 1973 New York City is racism and diversity. Every female character is minor, unempowered, a caretaker, or all three. This and police corruption (thank goodness we’ve abolished that!) seem to be acceptable targets. My point is, if the show had a diverse cast, then the writers would have to tackle the casual racism of the 1970s. That’s touchy.
None of the main characters appear to me to be anything but white. The police station is white. The street scenes are white. This is supposed to be NEW YORK CITY, for crying out loud. There are a couple of brown perps at a big warehouse bust scene, but blink and you’ll miss them. Is it that the writers decided not to touch this at all, so as not to alienate their audience? We, meaning the white audience for this show (who presumably does not want to be racist or be perceived as racist), are thrown the small diversity bone of knowing that Detective Tyler’s 2008 self was in a relationship with Lisa Bonet’s character, who the audience understands is black. Does this somehow negate the fact that there are no other non-white people on the show? I think it fooled me for a little while.
I can’t say for sure, but I would think viewers who are non-white would notice the lack right away, and so perhaps would not become part of the audience for a show like this. I admit it took me two episodes to notice this, so perhaps the audience is people who either don’t think of themselves as racist or don’t want to be racist, and yet don’t notice a lack like this. Perhaps it doesn’t affect the realism for the writers and the audience the show may develop, similar to Seinfeld Syndrome. It also makes me ask, why is it okay for the characters to call the strongest female character on the show “No-Nuts,” but then to completely exclude non-white characters?
I think it’s complicated, but in part because the inclusion of racism and racial conflicts would make the white male cops completely unsympathetic. It would have the same effect on Detective Tyler, who remains likable though he mostly stands by while the 1973 women are treated in a sexist fashion. To watch the main character remain silent in the face of racism would be too much, as it has nothing to do with the manliness of the cops. The message we get from these rough-and-tumble cops that they are manly, and though misguided, are still tough, cool cop guys who are to be admired on some level.
But back to the women! A few lines up I mentioned that all the female characters are weak (or at least unempowered), minor, or caretakers. Another thing they are, all across the board, is Good.
Officer Norris is the good, long-suffering lady cop who worries about Tyler’s mental state and covers up his lunatic ravings about how he misses his universal remote (okay, kidding about the remote part). A precinct secretary sets up a crime using her resources at the police station to help her criminal boyfriend. But she was a GOOD person at heart, just lonely and in need of some attention from a smooth-talking lawbreaker. Out of nowhere, hey, there’s a crazy free love hippie girl that Tyler meets in his apartment hallway. Hippie girl is starkers and since we are constantly reminded that Tyler is a nice guy, superior to his 1973 brethren, he discreetly looks away. The naked hippie girl is good, innocent, and harmless, and serves to loosen Detective Tyler up by making him dance and caring for him by feeding him marijuana lasagna. There are no female criminals in this world, not even some bedraggled police station hos. Women in this world do not even have the power to commit crimes or perpetrate evil in their own capacity in this 1973 world.
And the men, except for Mary Sue Tyler, are Bad. They are lazy, sexist, corrupt, condescending, drunken, cannot swim, one cop is gunning for Tyler’s job, they all call Tyler a rat (because he has a hunch about the crime involving the precinct secretary, follows procedure, and investigates leads.). Tyler is completely good and blameless like the women, and though he will treat them respectfully and as equals one-on-one, he is not their ally. The viewer must never forget that he is just a visitor to this crazy, messed up 1973, when in Rome, etc.
So. Life on Mars has its problems, but not really more so than every single other show on television. I admit I am sucked into the mystery and I find the main characters compelling, and the maintext of the writing isn’t awful. I like that it’s complicated–that’s one major thing, of course, that a ’70s cop show does not having going for it. I’m going to stick with it for now.
