Life on Mars

If there's one thing I like, it's cool TV shows with fabulous music. And if the pilot of ABC's new series Life on Mars is anything to go by, there is great potential for it.

The sitch: Life on Mars is a remake of the BBC show of the same title. While investigating a homicide in present-day NYC, Detective Sam Tyler (Jason O'Mara) gets hit by a car and wakes up back in 1973 with hippies roaming the streets and 8-tracks instead of iPods. He finds himself still working for the NYPD - just the 1973 version of it, where women aren't exactly allowed on the force other than to talk to hysterical girlfriends and catch runaway kitties. Quite a twist in time, considering his own partner back in the 21st century is a woman - and also his girlfriend, who was incidentally kidnapped right before his trip back to the seventies. And, oh yeah, the first case he works on in the seventies? It's got links to his girlfriend's kidnapping.

What a doozy of a time travel.

The cool bits:
The music. The show's title is from the David Bowie song, which provides as a transition between now and then, first playing on Sam's very digital iPod, then on Sam's very analog 8-track tape. Then there's The Who's "Baba O'Reilly" in the vinyl record store. Soundtracks for the show also include Sweet's seventies song "Little Willy" and Rolling Stones' "Out of Time" from the sixties. If this show keeps up with the very excellent classic rock tunes, it'll get no complaints from me.

The crime drama with a difference. After watching tons of crime dramas like Bones and Life, and the various CSI franchises, TV reality pretty much has us expecting DNA tests and fingerprinting and lab results at the snap of your fingers. Then you hear Sam's new colleagues talk about fingerprinting results arriving in "weeks" as if it's the most amazing thing ever, and all you can think is, whoa.

LoM shows just how much the world has changed in 35 years. The crime tech advancement aside, 1973 New York also means old-school television, long-haired hippies dancing all down the streets, vinyl record stores with no inkling of what CDs are (let alone iPods), women transiting through women's liberation to join the all-male workforce.

And, of course, the World Trade Center, pre-9/11.

The jolt that Sam gets when he first sees the Twin Towers is one most everyone would get, considering that we've lived in a world so changed by what happened to it for seven years now. Even knowing it's all CGI, that visual of the two buildings was probably the most impactful out of everything on that episode.

So here's to the promising new series. May it continue to surprise without going insane (like Prison Break's already done. Or like Heroes seems to be going for. Blah.).