COMMENTARY
TV won’t be the same without ‘Life on Mars’
You have no idea how much I’m going to miss “Life on Mars” when it ends for good next Wednesday. And no, the imminent return of Denis Leary and “Rescue Me” won’t make up for it either.
The lame duck “Life on Mars” has barely been around long enough to find out where the bathroom is and yet it has something unique I’m going to miss terribly— a true, what-the- hell nuttiness, a hallucinatory merriment that just couldn’t be predicted from week to week.
The only thing we all knew from Day One is that eventually Jason O’Mara and Gretchen Mol would end up holding hands and making goo-goo eyes at each other. No lead actor could charge up grown female watchers the way O’Mara seemed to and not notice, on the show, how much angel-haired sunshine beamed out of Mol every time her face turned in his direction.
The big scene of hand holding and ocular goo-goo happened on Wednesday.
Next Wednesday for the finale? I haven’t the foggiest idea what’s going to happen and I’m not even going to try to guess. Just know that I’m there and I urge you to be too, even if you’ve never watched it before and are likely to be all at sea with the plot.
Advance word is that it won’t end the way the Brit series it’s based on did, which makes the final explanation for the lead character’s sudden residence in 1973 after being hit by a car in 2008 anybody’s guess.
What you have to understand is that under ordinary circumstances, Time Travel TV annoys the bejabbers out of me. But then “Life on Mars” (named after the David Bowie song and fashioned after the Brit series of the same name) was never ordinary Time Travel TV. It was a kind of perfect 2009 parable of what might happen if your life went from blissful comfort to chaos and grunge.
You could only pray you’d have Mol to save you.
What I’m finding fascinating about most of the smartest and best network series TV in 2009 is how much of it has one basic template, which is the “House” template.
In other words, you’ve got the male lead who is either a genius or nuts or a social outcast or all three in perfectly triangulated alienation. He might be in constant pain and misery like “House” or in equally constant smirking amusement like Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) on “The Mentalist.” But he’s always the smartest guy in the room and a major certifiable flake who’s barely escaped institutionalization.
And—crucial to them all— is the presence of a beautiful woman to act as either a) superior or b) significant reality principle or c) both.
It is the set-up on “Life,” for instance, and now, on Monday nights, the new “Castle,” in which two actors who look exactly like the Up from Soaps performers they are play a spoiled mystery novelist allowed to pal around with a tough female cop as long as he doesn’t get in the way—a virtual novelistic Xerox of “The Mentalist.”
Almost always, in these shows, it’s the man’s job to be a brilliant, loquacious lunatic (or, at least on “The Eleventh Hour,” the vulnerable Big Brain) and the woman’s to be the hard-headed realist and the one who wields the Big Gun.
Fascinating, eh what?
It’s fun to watch (even in a mediocrity like “Castle”) and sometimes even more than fun. But I must say, I’m waiting to see if anyone’s ever going to get away with a gender role reversal, i. e. the zany genius with all the Wittgensteinian one-liners and the troubled past is female while the Reality Principle is played by a male—a sort of stodgy Dr. Watson type who always makes sure there’s gas in the car and time for lunch.
And don’t tell me “Bones” does that either. There, too, it’s the man who takes the instinctive fliers and the woman who stays rooted solidly to the earth.
Where—I’m asking—is the same set-up in reverse?
Call it “Life on Venus.”
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