calendarlive.com: TELEVISION REVIEWS - Playing games with time, space

I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do: I'm going to give this a shot tonight.

(Puts hands on hips)
But only,

(Puts on sunglasses)
Because CSI: Miami is a rerun.

(Cue: "Don't get fooled again.")

calendarlive.com: TELEVISION REVIEWS - Playing games with time, space: "'Life on Mars,' premiering Monday on BBC America, is such a series; it takes its name from a song by that most science-fictional pop star, David Bowie, and it is dark fun, a clever twist on the familiar story of going back in time to reclaim the present. Created by writers associated with the flashy con-man comedy 'Hustle' (playing here on AMC), it concerns a Manchester police detective, Sam Tyler (John Simm), who is hit by a car in 2006 and wakes up — or does he? — in 1973, in a pair of flared trousers and a shirt with a collar wide enough to launch jets from.

It is not, strictly speaking, sci-fi, since everything logically points to Tyler actually being in a coma in 2006, cocooned in 'deep REM sleep from which he cannot wake,' or so he hears in one of the fragments of present-day reality that burst like feedback into his 1973 head. And there is his otherwise unaccountable foreknowledge. (You could have worked out back then that there'd be mobile phones and personal computers coming, but who could have predicted Gary Numan's song 'Cars'?)

But the series uses the usual fish-out-of-water conventions of time travel — the humorous contrasts between then and now (the bad wallpaper, the dial telephones, the sideburns), the attempts to get home — and the writers do their best to keep Tyler's state an open question, at least in his mind. The characters in his 1973 world consider themselves real, and so do we, even as we know he might be making them up. What makes such ambiguity easy to accept, of course, is that none of it's real — it's a TV show, it's all made up.

On one level, 'Life on Mars' can be seen as a witty response to the modern police procedural, with its emphasis on cutting-edge forensic science and impossibly good-looking rainbow casts. Here the detectives are all rumpled white men with bad facial hair and bad teeth, working in a dark, messy, smoky room lorded over by genially thuggish DCI Hunt (the mighty Philip Glenister), for whom 'evidence' means whatever he can plant on a suspect and the phrase 'excessive force' an oxymoron. (Though all in the service of good.) Tyler, who comes from more enlightened times, literally bumps heads with him."