This show purports to be weird, but "weird" can't make it exciting.
The good stuff: the audience is drawn in by the surreal concept as presented in the first episode, there are some nice uses of the "out of time" premise throughout to explain how police procedures and behavior have changed since the 1970s, and Philip Glenister steals the show as Gene Hunt, the foul-mouthed chief inspector who runs roughshod over Sam Tyler, the 2006 hot cop stranded in a decade of bell bottoms and bad British food.
But those quirks don't make for a great show, or even a good one, really. The first series goes downhill around the time the producers toss us a maudlin after-school-special episode about football hooliganism, featuring a blank-faced, flat-voiced child actor - far from the only misplaced youngster to torture our eyes and ears in this series.
The writing varies greatly in quality from episode to episode, and the supposed payoff in the final episode of series 1 is both predictable and nonsensical, attached to the supposed overarching plot by the flimsiest of threads. For some reason, we're given the same 'tense', underwhelming Freudian scene twice within the last minutes of Series One. It makes no narrative sense the first time - and I don't mean it's surreal or challenging; it simply makes no sense for the protagonist to behave the way he does, even according to the dream-logic of the show. The second time we're forced to sit through the same mystifying confrontation, I felt my brain down-shifting from "frustrated" to "bored", and began thinking about my lunch plans for the following day . . . not the sort of rumination that the show's creators wanted to evoke, I'd assume.
The rest of the cast does fine with what they're given, and deserves plenty of the praise they've received, but decent delivery of so-so scripts, hints of warped reality, and a little retro comedy here and there? None of this covers up how this show is somewhere beneath the lesser-known Law & Order series when it comes to the cop stuff.
And "Life on Mars" is about 80-90% low-quality cop stuff, with the bizarre elements as window dressing. There's a lot of Our Hero leaping to miraculous conclusions when he happens to overhear a word vaguely related to the case. There's a lot of sniveling rats getting slammed into walls, and a lot of shady characters suddenly spilling their guts when they're asked the same question, but slowly. And. Seriously. This time. You've seen it before, and done better, too.
"Life on Mars" tries to pass all of this off as reference to the 1970s cop dramas it both mocks and worships, but instead, it comes across as lazy and aimless imitation of better prime-time television drama from the 2000s. I stuck with it in the hopes that the first series would end on a high note that would bring me back for the second, but really, the first series finale episode is some of the worst TV I've ever seen.
This gets 5 out of 10, because if you picked a random cop drama OR a random Twin-Peaks-imitating weird-out suspense series to watch instead, there's about a 50% chance it would be better than "Life on Mars".
