The police station is a time capsule, a monument to the kind of institutionalized dinginess that distinguished precincts of its time, circa 1973. Steel desks, the kind found at office liquidators, face each other at odd angles and are covered with manila folders, fat, brown accordion folders, stained blotters-the minutiae of crime solving. Next to the each desk stand the true dinosaurs of communication-typewriters, a few electric and one very sad Royal manual.
In one corner of the room, another artifact of the period sticks out like a sore thumb: a standing metal and plexiglass pay phone booth. It’s hard to decide which is the oldest prop in the room, but one definite candidate is the mammoth Webster’s Dictionary. It measures about eight-inches thick and the copyright is 1961. We had bigger vocabularies back then.
This is the 125th police precinct on the new ABC series “Life on Mars.” The science fiction-style cop, based on a BBC series whose title is a David Bowie song, show sends its hero, Detective Sam Tyler (Jason O’Mara), on the trip of his lifetime. After getting hit by a car and knocked unconscious, he wakes up in 1973-35 years earlier-and finds himself working at a precinct where police brutality is the name of the game. His boss is Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel), a detective straight out of “The French Connection.” His rival, Ray Carling (Michael Imperioli), is a wisecracking throwback to the era of muttonchops and handlebar moustaches. His possible love interest, Annie Norris (Gretchen Mol), is relegated to the Police Women’s Bureau, a division that solves petty crimes, even though she has a degree in psychology.
While the show suggests that Sam is living in 1973 because he’s in coma, it still raises plenty of questions of why he’s there. Unsavory secrets about his own family come to light. In a scene filming at the Kaufman-Astoria studios, Sam confronts a Steve Rubell-style club Owner, played with Jerry Orbach-style panache by Robert Klein, about hassling a woman who is really the detective’s mother. Decorating with a ghastly red shag carpet and black-and-gold doors, Club Vendetta screams the 1970s, as does the amusingly wide collar of Sam’s shirt. The scene runs three-and-a-half pages in the script and, with rehearsals, close-ups and repeated takes for blown lines, each page takes an hour to film.
For O’Mara, a Dublin-born actor with TV star charisma, that’s nothing compared to the two years he waited for “Life on Mars” to find, well, life. Originally acquired by David E. Kelley and set in Los Angeles, the production was first interrupted by the writers’ strike and later upended when the ABC brought a new producing team in to run the show. Their first decision: to move the show to New York. O’Mara was the only cast member to travel.
“It was odd,” he says of the circumstances. “I had made friends with my co-stars. But I didn’t have a choice.” The upside: “New York has a greater sense of place. When you think of New York in 1973, images come to you straightaway,” says O’Mara, 36. “Serpico. The French Connection. It was a dirty, dangerous place. Whereas, Los Angeles, 1973, you can’t really place it.”
Executive producer Scott Rosenberg had the same feeling about L.A. as a location. “It’s a big, amorphous blob,” he says. Besides, he was eager to sink his creative teeth into New York’s crime history, from heroin and crack to the 1977 blackout. He admitted he and his partners, Josh Applebaum and David Nemec from “October Road,” are still deciding whether “Life on Mars” will use real-life events to mark time.
“We’re shooting in New York City, where we’re going to see winter, then in spring, so clearly time will pass. We’re in the midst of crafting that right now.”
What he’s hoping for, ideally, is that “Life on Mars,” with its dream cast, period detail and hint of romance will appeal to men and women.
“It’s a 1973 cop show with science fiction elements but we can also make it funny and poignant. My dream is that couples sit down to watch and they become, like. Ok, babe I’ll watch ‘Grey’s’ but you gotta watch ‘Life on Mars’ with me.”
LIFE ON MARS
Thursday, 10 p.m., ABC