Studio: E1 Entertainment

If it wasn't for Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm, I might have given up on North American TV all together. But British TV is a whole other story. The programming on BBC is second to none. Mighty Boosh, Spooks (MI:5), Black Books, Hotel Babylon, Primeval, Planet Earth, the list just goes on and on. And even though I missed the first season, you can now add Life On Mars to that list. The Brits tend to do very well with sci-fi, and I find the best sci-fi these days is the understated variety. Films that eschew fantastical plots to focus on more realistic probabilities, movies like Children of Men and The Road are good examples. Life On Mars is sci-fi but only in so far as what you are watching is not the main character's reality, he is in a coma and you are seeing what it's like in his mind while he's stuck there...and apparently "in his mind" it is 1973 and he is a copper. The genius of the show is that while he knows he was in an car accident in 2006, he can't figure out how he ended up in 1973. Since he is a cop in 2006 in his real life, he applies modern techniques to 1970s crimes with great success. Yet his peers quickly mark him out as odd and he in return is appalled by their unethical policing. It's these plot points that make this show stick out from the other dozen police procedural dramas on the boob tube these days. While I do have to question a bit of a shoddy ending, this series was well worth watching.