Pages tagged “Life on Mars”

If a TV show wants to win me over as a fan, they could do no better than to sing the praises of Tom Waits for its viewers. In Life on Mars, during one of Episode 6's most memorable scenes, as Sam (Jason O'Mara) and Annie (Gretchen Mol) are held hostage in a mental ward, Annie tells Sam to think about his happiest moment to keep from going crazy. Sam sets the scene for Annie, saying that Tom Waits was playing on the jukebox and asks her if he's famous yet in 1973. She says he's never heard of him and he replies, "He's soon to become the patron saint of the sad and downtrodden New Yorker." Sam just got a lot cooler by association in my eyes—partially redeeming his attempts last week to rap lines from Vanilla Ice or this week to moonwalk.

Whoopi Goldberg was the much-publicized guest of this week's Life on Mars, but while it was fun seeing her as Brother Love Butter, the voice of the Black Liberation Army, she wasn't what made this the show's best episode yet. (In fact, her motives for helping Sam were the muddiest thing about the show.) Part of the fun of any time-traveling fantasy is to ponder how someone with the knowledge of 2008 would briefly react to other eras. But Life on Mars digs deeper as Sam Tyler is stuck in 1973 and settling into his life there.

Entertainment criticism mecca Metacritic has released its top 10 highest rated new Fall TV shows. Created in 2001, the site combines all the reviews of any given show and rates them on a 0-100 scale to get to the "Metascore." This is considered a weighted average because the site assigns more significance to some critics/publications over others due to the quality of the source.

Last week, we reviewed the debut episode of Life on Mars, The American remake of British cop show with a time-traveling twist. But if you missed it, you can watch right here ad-free:

The latest British import to hit American network TV is a cop show with a twist. In the original Life on Mars, which aired Stateside on BBC America the last two years, detective Sam Tyler is hit by a car in the year 2006 and wakes up in his beloved Manchester, U.K., in 1973, not knowing how or why he got there, whether he's traveled through time, lying in a hospital bed in coma and dreaming of the past, or just plain crazy. Like AMC's Mad Men, the show explored sexism and abuse of power, but Life on Mars was much more explicit in its judgments with a protagonist with modern-day sensibilities.

With a new fall TV line-up, comes a new hope for quality shows. Call me an optimist if you like. I did have hope that Obama and McCain would offer a higher level of discourse to our political landscape, and we can all see how that's working out. But here are five shows that could maybe, possibly have an off-chance of being good:

Remember the climax of Reservoir Dogs where Harvey Keitel (Mr. White) shoots the exposed undercover cop with that look of sheer disgust on his face at the end of the Mexican stand-off? (Oh yeah, spoiler alert! But if you haven't seen it yet, get it together, people, it's Reservoir Dogs.) Well, it appears Keitel will take on a slightly different disposition toward the men in blue for his upcoming television project.