Life On Mars: the US remake

Simon Brew

US TV has got its hands on Life On Mars - and the pilot film is already in the can...!

Published on Mar 5, 2008

Over the past week, there’s been widespread reporting that the BBC has sold Life On Mars to Spain, where it’ll be remade. Much press release munching later, we did – well, Martin did – some searching, and discovered something that pretty much everyone we spoke to had missed: that there’s an American TV movie remake already in the can, and set to be broadcast in the States later this year. When did they sneak that one past us?

David E Kelley, the man you have to thank for Ally McBeal, Doogie Howser and Boston Legal, is the man who has put it together. We’d assume that the movie is a pilot for a potential fuller remake of the series, and Kelley has brought in West Wing-veteran and So I Married An Axe Murderer director Thomas Schlamme to go behind the camera.

In the move across the channel, John Simm’s Sam Tyler has turned into Jason O’Mara’s Sam Tyler. O’Mara was the result, apparently, of one of those exhaustive nationwide searches where we guess everyone e-mails their audition to Los Angeles. O’Mara previously played Chopper 3 in Space Truckers and popped up in Resident Evil: Extinction. It’s fair to say that Life On Mars could be his big break.

Meanwhile, Gene Hunt is being reimagined in the form of Colm Meaney. We’re huge fans of Colm Meaney, and can see that it might just work. He’s got sizeable shoes to fill, though, and it’ll be interesting to see how well he manages to fill them.

The rest of the cast? Rachelle (“25-year old Tuvia in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”) Lefevre is Detective Annie Cartwright, Stephanie “Charlotte from Home & Away” Chaves-Jacobsen is Maya Robinson and Abby Eiland is Beth Mitchell.

No word on a transmission date yet, but the US Life On Mars is due to be shown on the ABC network before the year is out. It’s also being produced by 20th Century Fox, the same 20th Century Fox we were talking about just yesterday….

Users Comments

Re: Life On Mars: the US remake
Posted By khodge 1 March 5, 2008 11:07:14 AM

Um... I knew about this. I wrote the following on my LJ blog back on August 22nd, 2007: British cult hit "Life on Mars", a cop show about a police officer who believes he has travelled back in time to the less politically correct 1970s, is being remade for the US market. For every UK to US remake success (The (American) Office, Pop (American) Idol), there are a dozen or so complete fuck-ups. The US version of Cracker, for example (not edgy enough) or Coupling (not edgy enough) or Fawlty Towers (just crap). The really odd thing about this remake is the casting. Colm Meany and Jason O'Mara, the leads in the US version, are a pair of Irish guys. Not pretending to be Irish, plastic shamrock, extra cold Guiness drinking "Irish" Americans either; they're proper Dublin born and bred. Why? Maybe the TV executives think that if they have a cop show with a pair of English leads, Americans will get confused and start wondering where Jack Bauer is and why he hasn't shot them yet.