LoM

[gaspode]

The trailer for Life On Mars Us is starting to circulate ..

http://www.news4jax.com/entertainmenttonight/16252995/detail.html - Click the link on the right of the page.

To be honest it looks pretty good in it's own way. I know people are going to bitch and moan (the slashers in particular) but LoM in particular is something that has to be changed to resonate with it's US audience - it's all about nostalga remember, and I think they have got the look spot on for 1973 American Cop shows, remember at that time while we had the sweeney they had Kojak. The show needed to be translated for a mass audience over there.

Its going to be a different dynamic and thats a good thing - plus I suspect David E Kelly is planning on a traditional US format (ie 20 episode season) so it will be a different show - and I like the idea on the Colm Meaney take on Gene Hunt. It's a David Kelley show, so yes theres bound to be more humour, but as a huge fan of Boston Legal, the Practice and even Ally McBeal i'm more than prepared to give it a shot rather than shoot it down before it even starts (people are doing it with this and the new B7 - and they did it with Galactica). Theres always room for a new take on something - if its crap its crap - but don't prejudge).

Comments

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

As I've often said, the original trailer for the real Life on Mars was so bad I nearly didn't watch the show. That was a slightly different case, as it didn't include any actual footage from an actual episode, but was specially shot to make it look as if it was going to be jokes about the naffness of 1973. And of course Life on Mars was very funny, but was also very serious. The second season trailer, viz the Camberwick Green sequence lifted from 2.05, was brilliantly appropriate, because it was very funny but also showcased the disturbing issue of Gene's violence towards suspects.

This trailer's different because it appears to be using actual footage, and it's quite weird seeing some sequences so closely modelled on the original but with such a different tone. My guess from this is that they're going for a much lighter mood. We didn't see very much of Colm Meaney's Gene, but my hunch is that he'll be a bit non-PC with a heart of gold, and the dark side of him will be toned down. Which... well, if they want to do that, they can do that, but I don't see why they didn't change the names of all the characters, as they did with the American version of Queer as Folk. It looks as if they've changed Ray and Chris, so why not all of them?

Maybe, as you say, they're just trying to reflect the difference between Kojak's lollipoppery and the Sweeney's violence, and to get a darker version they'd need to wait thirty years and go for something like The Shield. Or anything else that there's been in between; I haven't watched enough cop shows to know. It's not as if they couldn't do dark; I've been thinking recently that there are echoes of Life on Mars in Deadwood, with crooked fixer Al Swearengen who's redeemed by his protective attitude to the community and has a complex relationship ranging between violence and alliance with uptight sheriff Seth Bullock, not to mention one thuggish sidekick (Dan Dority) and one simple-minded one (Johnny Burns). But I don't know whether you can get that sort of thing outside HBO.

[sugoll.livejournal.com]

American Gothic was CBS.