The US version of Life On Mars has just reached TV screens here in the UK, and, unlike its British forerunner, it isn’t by any means “must watch” television. From the moment the US version of Gene Hunt drags the American Sam Tyler into his office and punches him viciously in the stomach early in the first episode we know this isn’t going to work.
Here, Gene Hunt is played by Philip Glenister, a large, violent, acne-scarred, good-hearted blond brute of a DCI who has become a national fantasy hero by doing all the things we’d like our current crop of PC PC Plods to be doing to criminals – i.e. catching them, beating a confession out of them, and getting them banged up in some malodorous hell-hole of a Victorian gaol where prisoners are crammed in eight to a cell and the guards are all registered psychopaths. Here, Sam Tyler is ever-so ‘Noughties – slight, trendy-looking, worried about everyone’s rights, and generally “on message”.
Just looking at them, we know that any physical confrontation between DCI Hunt and DC Tyler would leave the latter with a very sore face. And it’s here the American producers landed themselves with a major problem. The US Gene Hunt is played by Harvey Keitel. Now, Keitel is a great actor – Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction – but he is a wizened, short-arsed 70-year old who looks like he’d need protection from any criminal over the age of 10. Jason O’Mara is a big, muscular, well-knit man who looks as if he could beat Keitel in a fight just by staring hard at him. If I were an American, I know who I’d want to be out there clearing scum off the streets.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the wonderful Michael Imperioli (Tony Soprano’s heroin addict “nephew”, Christopher) as one of Harvey Keitel’s detectives, is forced to utter leaden one-liners designed to give everyone a non-PC thrill. They don’t; they’re just embarrassing.
Apart from that, it’s a pretty good show – New York’s grubby, chaotic, scary 1970s’ streets are particularly well-captured. But an incomprehensible casting decision killed the series before they’d even started filming. Shame, that.
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