This week’s column is brought to you by the 1980s as I take a look at the BBC America premiere of Ashes To Ashes, the sequel to the immensely popular Life On Mars. Like it’s predessesor, Ashes To Ashes features a police officer in present day being mortally injured, only to awaken in a similar identity decades in the past. The first show brought us the raging 1970s in Manchester. This time around it’s London in 1981 complete with glam rock soundtrack and a few familiar faces from the previous incarnation. Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister), Ray Carling (Dean Andrews) and Chris Skelton (Marshall Lancaster) have transferred to London subsequent to the death of the original series’ time-lost Sam Tyler. Enter DI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes). From Drake’s 2008 perspective Sam Tyler committed suicide after awakening from a coma where he experienced his temporal shift. Having extensively studied Tyler’s notes and case, when she awakens in 1981 following being shot at point blank range, Drake immediately calls hallucination. As per Life On Mars, Hunt et al. refuse to go gently into that good diagnoses. Drake must stumble through a harsher remake of That ’80s Show while trying to find a trigger to awaken herself in 2008. Dramatic hi-jinks ensue.
Alex Drake is, in many ways, a more vulnerable character that Sam Tyler ever was. Not only is she a woman in an era that was still reproachfully indignant towards the “fairer sex,” but she also has a daughter back in the present. As any parent would, she misses her daughter and that sometimes steals her concentration when she instead should be steeling her resolve. Keeley Hawes does a great job of portraying Drake losing it as she becomes less sure this is all in her head as well as the moments when she does what’s needed to get the job done. Drake is more than capable of keeping up with Gene Hunt and dishing back to him his snarkiness and sexism in a much more effective and disarming a way than Sam Tyler ever could.
No offense to the hugely talented Harvey Keitel (who plays Gene Hunt in the American Life On Mars remake), but no one can play the Gene Genie like Philip Glenister. True, he had the advantage of originating the character, but he dances with being an asshole with a heart of tarnished gold with incredible ease. Glenister’s Hunt is one of those characters that is so instantly iconic that he threatens to overshadow the characters that the series premise is based on. Both Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes would not work without Gene Hunt for the protagonists to play off of and Hunt would be either too cartooney or laughably ineffective without Glenister in the role. Ashes is just about to start it’s second series in England and I sincerely hope it has a couple more to go. Gene Hunt is a character that will be impossible to say goodbye to.
So, if you need to, brush up on things with Life On Mars on DVD and tune in on Saturday at 9:00PM EST for the BBC America premiere of the latest outstanding British show, Ashes To Ashes.