I'm really enjoying Life On Mars. It's a TV series with a really weird and complicated premise, which it mostly ignores as much as possible. John Simm plays Sam Tyler, a police officer who finds himself back in 1973 after a near-fatal accident in 2006. He's a police officer in 1973 too, and nobody believes he's from the future. Occasionally, TVs and radios talk to him, he hears voices talking about him as if he's in hospital in a coma and he has nightmares where the girl from the TV test card chants ominous cryptic rhymes at him while he screams and hides in the corner.
But for the most part, it's a 1970s cop show, with Sam as the by-the-book copper, horrified by his boss's willingness to break the rules if it gets the job done. The combination of genres and themes shouldn't work, but it really does. John Simm never quite looks like a policeman to me, but that really just adds to the weirdness and makes it work better. He was also great in that fantastic drama series from a few years ago, The Lakes, so it's good to see him with another starring role in a well-written show.
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