My Review of Life on Mars

Life on Mars is the new ABC documentary about NASA’s attempts to discover microbial life trapped in the ice on the Red Planet. To do this, NASA has sent astronaut Sam Tyler back in time to 1973. How this is supposed to find interstellar life is unclear, but it raises two interesting points: First, what are they smoking at NASA, and second, where the hell did they get a time machine? I know the government is full of black budgets and secret agendas, but if there really was a working American time machine I think maybe the fall of Saigon might have gone a bit differently.

Astronaut Tyler wound up in NYC with nothing but a spacesuit and a picture of President Nixon. New York was a very different place back then. The Mayor was short and effeminate and Washington Square was full of hippies. Oh, sorry, I mean it was the same. After trying to break through a sewer main to take a core sample, Tyler was arrested and taken to a typical 1973 NYC police precinct. The captain was John Shaft, the detectives were Superfly and Foxy Brown, and the night shift commander was Blacula.

Mistaking his spacesuit for a new crime scene outfit, Sam Tyler was made a detective on the force. Unbeknownst to him, his partner, Superfly, was not Superfly but really Sam Beckett, who had quantum leaped back in order to send Tyler home to 2008. He didn’t know it, however, because Al was busy running algorithms through Ziggy to determine in which week of 1973 he would see the shortest miniskirts.

Also unknown to Astronaut Tyler is the fact that his mother, Rose, would soon be taking off in the TARDIS and his real father was not the lowlife gambler Sam always thought he was but actually a sentient green pimento from Zaklon Seven. He’d be prouder of the gambler.

Every week, Sam Tyler faces different stereotypical 1973 problems, like rotary phones, Spiro Agnew, and hairy female armpits. While Tyler has never stopped searching for life on the planet Mars, he is becoming increasingly frustrated by the distance between Mars and his apartment on 118^th street. In episode seven he tried to build a giant ladder but failed when he discovered that his roof faced Saturn.

ABC has promised that future episodes would focus on Tyler’s attempts to fit in and lead a normal 1973 life, despite his language being peppered with unusual 2008 lingo like “OJ Simpson verdict,” “pathetic Soprano’s finale,” and “Barack.”

Life on Mars will have a good future on The Discovery Channel, where documentaries need only pull in small ratings to be successful.