Asking the Wrong Questions

So, the master plan for April is to start moving away from the recent all TV, all the time theme of this blog and return to your regularly scheduled book-blogging (though in the interim you might want to read these very interesting discussions of BSFA-nominated short fiction at Torque Control ), but this week was an interesting one in the TV annals, comprising an early death, a late death (though both, I would say, somewhat overdue) and a resurrection. Here are my thoughts. ER - The long-running hospital series came to an end this week after a fifteen-season run, and though I've been at best an occasional viewer for the last ten of those, it was hard not to feel a little misty this week, thinking back to those first five seasons and my deep devotion to the show during them. It's not that ER was the first 'grown-up' series I became invested in--that was either St. Elsewhere or LA Law --and it's not that it was my first fannish show--that was either original ...

If I were a particularly cynical person, I'd wonder whether the first, abysmal pilot for the US remake of Life on Mars had been intentionally released online once the decision was made to completely retool the show, as a way of lowering expectations and making the new, actual pilot look good by comparison. Most of the buzz I've been hearing in the last couple of weeks, after all, has tended towards the surprised discovery that the new, new Life on Mars doesn't completely suck, which in today's degraded television market is almost the same as saying that a show is good. (Seriously, is it just me or are things rather dismal on the TV front? The best I can seem to hope for is for shows to hold their ground, which in some cases-- Pushing Daisies , Dexter , How I Met Your Mother --is good, in others-- Sarah Connor , Chuck --is not nearly as good as I'd like, and in other still-- Heroes --is grounds for dropping a show. And when the best new show of the fall season ...

So, you're the production team parachuted in to save the American Life on Mars , scrambling desperately to turn its laughable pilot into something watchable.  You've just landed The Sopranos' s Michael Imperioli.  Who do you cast him as?  Imperioli is not really the right physical type for Gene, but with a little tweaking of the character he might work, and he could certainly pull off the combination of vulnerability, toughness and intelligence that made John Simm's Sam so winning, not to mention the character's working class background.  But no, apparently if you're producing the new Life on Mars and have been lucky enough to cast Michael Imperioli, you cast him as Ray .  I can hear the Italian stereotypes from here. This is yet another dispiriting choice on the part of the new production team, like the one to move the show's setting from LA (admittedly an awful decision) to New York.  One of the things that made the original Life on Mars special was tha...

There's a long, hot slog through the dull summer months yet to go before there's much of anything worth watching on TV, but as has become traditional in the last few years, a few of next year's pilots have started to leak online. Whether they were deliberately released as a way of generating buzz and creating an interested group of viewers, or simply made it online through some less kosher means, they give us a taste of what we have to look forward to. Here are my thoughts on two of them: Fringe - Let's be honest: 'J.J. Abrams does X-Files ' is no-one's idea of a winning formula. Take one television auteur whose name has become synonymous with big build-ups and poor follow-through, combine it with the second coming of a series that strung its viewers along for the better part of a decade promising a conclusion which it was ultimately incapable of delivering, and you're almost guaranteed a show that'll steal your heart and then break it. Except ...

On the one hand, the American Life on Mars is almost certainly a disaster waiting to happen. Above and beyond the fact that the American TV landscape is littered with the corpses of reworked British shows, the head writer is David E. Kelley, a man who never met a melodrama, or overworked sentence, he didn't like, and whose idea of humor is over the top shenanigans with CGI thrown in. I had pretty much planned on giving the show a miss. On the other hand, Niall just pointed me to this SciFi Wire report that Colm Meaney is being considered for the Gene Hunt role. I might actually have to watch the damn thing.

It's been said before, but one of the things that made Life on Mars unusual is--was--that by its very nature it couldn't reveal its genre until its very last episode. Was the show SF--had Sam Tyler travelled from his, and our, time to 1973?--or fantasy--was Sam insane, fabricating memories of a reality that just happened to be identical to ours?--or mimetic--was Sam in a coma following his accident, hallucinating 1973 as an extended metaphor for his predicament? It doesn't help that the show's writers seem to have changed their minds halfway through the story. If the first season premiere--in which Sam changed the course of future events--prioritized the time travel reading, the second season as whole seemed eager to drop it. As the series came to its end, we were left with a choice between madness and hallucination, and between two different kinds of slightly unsatisfying endings. If Sam is in a coma, then everyone he's met and everything that's happened over ...

Seven years after the publication of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay , and a good four or five years since he first described the general gist of its plot, Michael Chabon is finally about to publish another (adult) novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union , due this May. To tide us over that last stretch of Chabon-less months, however, the New York Times is serializing another new novel by Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road . And, in other highly-anticipated-book news, J.K. Rowling.com reports that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be published on July 21st. Time to make that Amazon order. UPDATE: More good news: season 2 of Life on Mars begins on February 13th .

Life on Mars season 2 teaser . Apparently this is a clip from an episode, which explains why it cuts off so abruptly, and boy is it strange. Still no sign of a premiere date, though.

Dark Horizons links to this article : According to an exclusive source to Dreamwatch Magazine the BBC are presently in negotiations with Kudos Entertainment about doing a follow up series, which will be set some time in the 1980’s and is being pitched as ‘Ashes To Ashes’, which is also a David Bowie song title. The new show should it go ahead will likely feature several of ‘Life On Mars’ more established characters only further on in their careers. As to which characters will return for this spin – off remains shrouded in secrecy. It should probably be noted that this is pretty fuzzy news, and Dark Horizons has certainly been known to repeat unsubstantiated rumors.

In all honesty, I didn't think they'd be able to pull it off. When I sat down on Thursday to watch the first season finale of Life on Mars , I expected disappointment. I expected the writers to avoid resolutions, to ignore the various eerie and bizarre elements they had sprinkled into their storylines, and give us nothing even resembling an answer. I can't even describe my joy at realizing how wrong I was. Without committing to an answer on the time-travel-or-coma question, the finale made perfect sense of many of the images that had been plaguing Sam, and gave us a definitive answer to the question of why he ended up where and when he did. I've complained about the obviousness of some of the show's mysteries, but I gasped with surprise when Annie showed up in that red dress, not least because this solution retroactively justifies some of the plot points that I found so problematic over the season's run--I worried that using Sam's dreams to lead him to his...

The BBC's new Life on Mars has been making the rounds in my corner of the blogosphere/LJ (check out Martin Lewis' write-up at Strange Horizons , and these discussions of a viewer's reverse culture shock and possible directions for the second season), and on the strength of so many positive voices I decided to give it a look. I've watched the first five episodes (out of eight--this is British television, remember), with the sixth airing tonight. The show's premise is that a modern Manchester police detective named Sam Tyler wakes up after a car accident and finds himself in 1973, still named Sam Tyler and still a policeman. Formerly a Detective Chief Inspector with his own department, Sam is now a Detective Inspector under the thumb of DCI Gene Hunt--as Lewis describes him, "an unreconstructed Northerner and dinosaur copper who has not yet been usurped by nimbler mammals like Tyler". Hunt is perfectly comfortable beating up suspects, planting incriminat...