Some more news on US Life on Mars has emerged from TCA (the Television Critics’ Association), as reported at After Ellen. Executive producer Josh Appelbaum was there—the last time I recall seeing Josh’s credit regularly was the first season of Martial Law, but I know I have seen his name on the odd programme since.
   Appelbaum gave a few more insights into the new series, saying that Annie Cartwright (the third!) has not been cast yet, but that she would be stronger than Liz White’s character. She would be more outspoken and connected to the women’s lib movement, he said.
   The storyline seems to have totally changed, too, probably giving the new Gene and Ray a chance to shine with some homophobic comments and how times have changed—which was one of the points of the original that the rejected Kelley pilot lacked:

Appelbaum also said “the first batch” of the series starts off with a gay story line. But wait! It’s about men and “deals with a returning Vietnam vet, with finding a victim that’s gay ... we deal with all of that stuff, specifically how it’s viewed at the time.”

   Interestingly, he talks about ‘1973’, so the year will not be changed in the American version after all.
   He also promised (at another source) that the show will have a different mythology to the original and that viewers will see ‘a dozen’ possibilities of what has happened to the US Sam Tyler by the end of episode two.

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More casting announcements are emerging from Hollywood about the American re-remake of Life on Mars.
   Jonathan Murphy (formerly Ronnie of October Road) has been cast as Det Chris Skelton, which means David E. Kelley’s successors on the programme have brought back both Chris and Ray—two characters missing from the first attempt at remaking the British series.
   The Hollywood Reporter’s description of Chris is familiar: ‘a jittery young detective who is new to the department.’
   It may mean that the redo will try to forge relationships between Sam Tyler and the rest of the department akin to the original’s.

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It’s understandable that TV One in New Zealand has to cut around 13 minutes out of each Life on Mars episode to fit commercials in, but why did it have to be the Camberwick Green sequence from episode five of series two? It was the best bit! (Sam still says he comes out of a box when he gets to the nick, and local viewers will be wondering what on earth he was on about.)
   For Kiwi Lifers, here is the missing bit.

Life on Mars, Camberwick Green Opening

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Torchwood finally premières on TV2, 10.30 p.m. tonight. So how many years behind the British are we? And has anyone seen a single promo for this show?

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I know Britain is as youth-obsessed as America sometimes, and an article in The Daily Telegraph, about cop show New Tricks, reminded me of that fact.
   Amanda Redman, the star of the show, and doing better here than in Honest, the remake of the New Zealand series Outrageous Fortune, says in the newspaper, ‘I find it extraordinary, because we are repeated more than any BBC drama ever, and for our repeats alone we get more viewings than the first showings of, for instance, Life on Mars.’
   She may be 48 but the other three principal actors in the series, Dennis Waterman, Alun Armstrong and James Bolan, are between 60 and 73.
   And for some reason, promoting this age group isn’t “cool”.
   The BBC needs to get itself sor’ed.
   With an ageing population in the west, the over-60s is one of the most desirable demographics and it would make a lot of sense to promote shows like New Tricks alongside its other hits such as Doctor Who and Ashes to Ashes.
   It’s why I think the US networks’ opposition to a last Columbo story, on the basis that Peter Falk, in his 80s, is too old to attract advertisers, is bollocks.
   And who is to say that being over 60 isn’t cool? Ask Tom Jones, who still draws in the crowds, including young ’uns, regularly.
   In the US every weeknight, David Letterman, 61, isn’t letting up.
   Interestingly, few seem to think that excluding people based on maturity is politically incorrect—yet we go around advancing the causes of the young.
   Dennis Waterman says in the article, ‘Apparently children are very impressed when their parents point me out and say, “That’s Dennis Waterman”. … They go, “What? Is there a real Dennis Waterman?” So maybe I’ve got a new audience there.’
   The west’s youth obsession hasn’t exactly moved the world on in too many ways: young, inexperienced leaders in politics have not proved visionary in many cases.
   I am not saying we should be like Saudi Arabia where old folks run the show without any idea of advancing human rights.
   But we owe baby boomers and those even older a great debt, and we should be championing their wisdom and experience, just as many great civilized societies have done. Older is cool, but we need to begin having a more accommodating mindset.

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Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos) will join the cast of US Life on Mars, according to Entertainment Weekly. The Hollywood Reporter, which broke the news, says Imperioli is the American Ray Carling. This does bode well: it means at least one of Ray and Chris will make it back into the script; the original US pilot had removed both characters.

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Samantha1

If ABC hadn’t advertised on Lucire last year with its series Samantha Who? I would have wondered what folks were talking about.
   For instance, I probably would have thought it was the first proper Chinese–American sitcom, Samantha Hoo. Yes, folks, east Asians on prime-timenetwork television. Yellow-skinned Americans with a rice cooker. This hasn’t been seen since Margaret Cho was in All American Girl. We haven’t had “our Cosby” emerge in the US yet.
   Samantha Hoo could have been a good series about a Chinese–American woman who wakes up after an accident and discovers she has no memory of her heritage, and thinks she’s white.
   Each episode she discovers something new about her ethnicity that she didn’t know before. The final episode has her speaking Cantonese rather than American English. Laughs all round.
   When it would have been explained to me that it was Who, and not Hoo, I would have then believed this was one of those Doctor Who spin-offs like Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Mysteries.
   Samantha Who is the story of a woman who is the love child between the Doctor and one of his female companions, and seeks to find her estranged father. It is filmed in the United States, so she has an American accent. Along the way, travelling in a white Volkswagen convertible, she pieces together parts of the timelord side of her past, meeting various characters from the main Doctor Who series to mark it as a spin-off: Sarah Jane Smith and K-9, Capt Leithbridge Stewart of UNIT, and someone looking suspiciously like Eric Roberts.
   She is raised to seek out the Doctor and the first-season finalé leads to her admission of a growing romance between her and Capt Jack, who also has an American accent (see, now the casting makes sense). The final of the series, meanwhile, sees her finally find her father, but not before Greg ‘B. J. McKay’ Evigan, as the Master, tries to claim that he is her biological father. Paul Reiser guests as the Doctor.
   As it turns out, Samantha Who? is actually an American TV series starring Christina Applegate, whose memory loss has caused her to blank out that she once played Kelly Bundy.

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E’s Kristin dos Santos and Jennifer Godwin report that executives have put the roles of Gene Hunt and Annie Cartwright back on the open market for the American version of Life on Mars. In my opinion, these are the two they should have looked at keeping: Colm Meaney needed better lines, and Rachelle Lefèvre’s was the only role that took a welcome direction that was fresh and different from the original.
   This early move does not bode well for the production, in my opinion—and Jason O’Mara as Sam Tyler needs a rethink. (ABC has a deal with Mr O’Mara, so he will be involved, I believe—but he needs to convey a lot more vulnerability than he did in the leaked, rejected pilot.)

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Just been brought to my attention: your own downloadable Gene Genie cellphone illustration!

http://www.voeveo.com/images/wallpaper/81694

It’s Ashes to Ashes Gene rather than Life on Mars Gene. And, fortunately, not US Life on Mars Capt Gene Hunt of the LAPD.
   I should also note that Voeveo is a Wellington, New Zealand-based company (as all the great internationals should be), one that has done well globally in spite of our government.

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Ashes to Ashes will be coming to New Zealand, according to the BBC. Though by the time it is on, I probably will have bought the DVD of the second series from Amazon UK. It will be on Prime, which either means no one will watch it, or it will become a destination hit as the Beeb’s Top Gear and Doctor Who have. I wonder if there are enough Lifers here since most mainstream viewers in 2007 went to watch Ugly Betty instead of Life on Mars, but if marketed with Doctor Who it might work.
   It would be nice to see Ashes here in New Zealand in the same year rather than having to wait a year as we did with TV One, maybe a little after Life on Mars finishes.
   Other concluded deals for series are listed in a press release sent to Scoop.

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