Life on Mars starts in New Zealand!

It’s a cop show, and apparently a US version has now been licensed by a company there, so you’ll get to see it. There’s a twist, though: DCI Sam Tyler is struck by a car in 2006 while investigating a murder. When he wakes up, it’s 1973, but he’s still a cop, newly transferred to Manchester. However, during various sequences, he’s sure he can hear the beeps of heart machines, and even doctors and nurses tending to him in a coma in 2006. So, you have a mix of genres: Sam gets through each week solving crimes, but applying future knowledge to them; he clashes in style with his immediate, and very politically incorrect, superior, DCI Gene Hunt (fish-out-of-water scenarios tend to do well on TV); and you are wondering whether he’s mad, he has time-travelled, or whether he’s in a coma and none of this is real.
Think of it as Quantum Leap meets The Sweeney. What is now weird, in the second season, which the BBC has said would be the last, there are clues that suggest he is not the only person in 1973 that knows he is from the future, and that he has a purpose.
It’s a pity the Limeys are only going make two seasons’ worth. I think once the “dumb Yanks” get hold of it, it will be a huge worldwide hit, last for five years, and rake in millions for the producers.