So I watched the first episode of the American remake of Life on Mars and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to articulate just how bad it was but that’s not gonna stop me giving it a go.

So American TV companies have a habit of taking other people’s TV shows and just completely sucking the soul out of them - we all saw the Red Dwarf pilots and then there’s all those dire J-Horror remakes they do - and Life On Mars is no exception. After watching it I’m kinda glad the idea of their Spaced remake isn’t going to plan.

Obviously they’ve kept the same idea behind the show: policeman gets hit by car, goes back in time but is he really back in time or is he just mad or in a coma? I think it might have worked had they not stuck so rigidly to the original, giving it a chance to be its own show but no, the opening plot was exactly the same as the original’s and on top of that, they’ve put zero imagination into the characters’ names, instead sticking to those from our series.

The way I currently see it right now is like a bad cover version, which has had little or no originality put into it. You’ve all heard them before, the ones that could be carbon-copies of the original song only played by a less proficient band, which ultimately destroys any character that the original had. A good cover version is one where the artists takes the song and infuses it with their own unique style, which explains why I love I Monster’s cover of Daydream In Blue so much.

Ok, I’m gonna continue with the bad cover version analogy as I think it’s working. With bad cover versions sometimes they end up lacking something, which invariably makes it worse and this show has fallen prey to that. For starters two of the main characters have disappeared completely, which I guess is their loss really as I think Ray and Chris are gems of characters but they obviously didn’t translate well into American. I believe this to be partially because of the whole humour, or lack of it, thing they’ve got going on as it pretty much renders them boring without it and this consequently also ruins the character of Gene Hunt. Sure, he’s still hitting suspects to get them to talk but without the quips he’s just not the same. I was so ready for the line, “Where’s the PC terminal?” “Who’s PC Terminal?” to pop up but alas, nowhere to be seen.

They’ve obviously tried to make up for the lack of humour by stepping up Sam and Annie’s relationship tenfold. When I watched the British version it was very much downplayed and it wasn’t really til towards the end of the second series when you realised that they actually were going to get together however it was so ridiculously in your face in this one that you could tell by halfway through the episode.

They’ve also been overcompensating with those flashbacks or whatever you want to call them as there were way more in this version unless I’m remembering wrongly, in which case they’re way less subtle, which in my books is a bad thing. Also, the actor playing Sam is clearly not as good as John Simm at shouting at TVs, which is a bit of a bummer for them.

So to surmise? It’s a cover version that tries so desperately to be its own thing but it just ends up failing due to a lack of imagination. The life and soul of the original seems to have disappeared completely, leaving it to just poorly mimic ours.