Alas, Life On Mars, we hardly knew ye.

When the U.S. version of Life On Mars kicked off last autumn, it was already off to a troubled start.  The original pilot, helmed by the zeitgeist-attuned David Kelly, was by all accounts a disaster, because Kelley was attuned to a zeitgeist shared only by himself and other elderly TV execs who live in a bubble of  90s television genius.  (You know, that time of ER, Friends, and Seinfeld.)

ABC scrapped the Kelly Life On Mars, which surprisingly was set in LA, not in Kelley’s beloved Boston, and retooled with a cast lousy with edginess–Harvey Keitel, Gretchen Mol, and Michael Imperioli, all veterans of indy movies and TV (if you count a run on a critically acclaimed HBO series as “indy”).  The new, improved show was also set in New York.  The expensive cast and expensive setting drove the economics that led to the show’s premature cancellation.

“Life Is A Rock,” the final episode of Life On Mars, ends the series the way U.S. audiences demand–neatly and unambiguously.  In contrast, the BBC series ended in a though-provoking and  morally ambiguous way.  The second-to-the-last Life On Mars episode, “Everyone Knows It’s Windy,” alluded to the BBC ending with its tense rooftop climax and the Special Agent Morgan character goading Sam into jumping to his death.  American audiences and TV writers could never make suicide, moral ambiguity, or any other depiction forbidden by the Hayes Code (though the Hayes Code is gone, its puritanical spirit very much lives on in broadcast TV) a significant plot point,  let alone the ending of a series.

Which leads us to the holodeck-snowglobe-it was all a dream ending of Life On Mars.  In the closing minutes of “Life Is A Rock,” we learn that Sam has indeed dreamt his dislocation in time from 2008 to 1973.  The show runners get points for making the dislocation in time an actual mistake or bug in his  dream programming.  Tina Seamonster has raised the question on the ‘cast about whether Sam was transported back to 1973, or was he transported back to a cheesy 1973 cop show, a la The Streets of San Francisco or Starsky and Hutch.  The ending as it played out makes me think that Sam was actually programmed to be in a cheesy 2008 procedural like Law and Order or CSI and then a glitch actually put him in Baretta or Starsky and Hutch.

How else could anyone explain that music?  Not the forgotten glam and classic rock treasures by David Bowie, The Sweet, and Lou Reed, but that Shaft-like pre-disco funk TV soundtrack stuff?

Nonetheless, the dream ending smacked of a cheap shot. It could have been a cheaper shot, or even cheesier, but the dream ending was masterfully performed and written.  It brought this high-concept series to a dignified and precisely engineered end.  Life On Mars, the ABC series, ended up being exactly as long as it should have been.

I’d like to think that Life On Mars is evidence that TV execs are thinking differently about how to make great shows, and that one of the goals is not to try to create decades-long franchises that plod on and on.  Maybe the network execs have actually learned something from the achievements of Sopranos, and even genre offerings such as Avatar: The Last Airbender and Babylon 5–that it’s better to make a big impact with the finite number of episodes that any showrunners have at their disposal, than to try to milk the franchise way past its useful shelf life.

As an episode and season finale, “Life Is A Rock” earns a respectable 4 out of 5 Harvey Keitel fists of fury.  As a series, as an achievement–Life On Mars gets 4.5  out of 5 Harvey Keitel fists of fury.

Which is good.  If only Life On Mars‘ level of quality were the norm, and the economics were able to put reality TV and Jay Leno out of business. . .