Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

kikkapi20 Love this show! I love the characters, the time it is set in and the music! Some excellent choices on the soundtrack, that IF i was born in the time period when it was set (1973) then it would have brought back memories i'm sure! All of my family and friends love this show! Gene Hunt is a fantastic character! I thinks he knows everything about policing but sadly he is generally wrong most of the time, and if he is right he gloats! He is also a great character for the mixture of seriousness and comedy about him! In short absolutely amazing show! Great producing, directing, acting, writing, and powerful camera work turn this show into something truly special. Enjoy this show, it's a kepper!

Don Druid This show purports to be weird, but "weird" can't make it exciting.The good stuff: the audience is drawn in by the surreal concept as presented in the first episode, there are some nice uses of the "out of time" premise throughout to explain how police procedures and behavior have changed since the 1970s, and Philip Glenister steals the show as Gene Hunt, the foul-mouthed chief inspector who runs roughshod over Sam Tyler, the 2006 hot cop stranded in a decade of bell bottoms and bad British food.But those quirks don't make for a great show, or even a good one, really. The first series goes downhill around the time the producers toss us a maudlin after-school-special episode about football hooliganism, featuring a blank-faced, flat-voiced child actor - far from the only misplaced youngster to torture our eyes and ears in this series.The writing varies greatly in quality from episode to episode, and the supposed payoff in the final episode of series 1 is both predictable and nonsensical, attached to the supposed overarching plot by the flimsiest of threads. For some reason, we're given the same 'tense', underwhelming Freudian scene twice within the last minutes of Series One. It makes no narrative sense the first time - and I don't mean it's surreal or challenging; it simply makes no sense for the protagonist to behave the way he does, even according to the dream-logic of the show. The second time we're forced to sit through the same mystifying confrontation, I felt my brain down-shifting from "frustrated" to "bored", and began thinking about my lunch plans for the following day . . . not the sort of rumination that the show's creators wanted to evoke, I'd assume.The rest of the cast does fine with what they're given, and deserves plenty of the praise they've received, but decent delivery of so-so scripts, hints of warped reality, and a little retro comedy here and there? None of this covers up how this show is somewhere beneath the lesser-known Law & Order series when it comes to the cop stuff.And "Life on Mars" is about 80-90% low-quality cop stuff, with the bizarre elements as window dressing. There's a lot of Our Hero leaping to miraculous conclusions when he happens to overhear a word vaguely related to the case. There's a lot of sniveling rats getting slammed into walls, and a lot of shady characters suddenly spilling their guts when they're asked the same question, but slowly. And. Seriously. This time. You've seen it before, and done better, too."Life on Mars" tries to pass all of this off as reference to the 1970s cop dramas it both mocks and worships, but instead, it comes across as lazy and aimless imitation of better prime-time television drama from the 2000s. I stuck with it in the hopes that the first series would end on a high note that would bring me back for the second, but really, the first series finale episode is some of the worst TV I've ever seen.This gets 5 out of 10, because if you picked a random cop drama OR a random Twin-Peaks-imitating weird-out suspense series to watch instead, there's about a 50% chance it would be better than "Life on Mars".

brooke53 It's shows like this that make me realize how awful American television is. There are an abundance of cookie-cutter police dramas, many with a ridiculous number of sequels, but Life on Mars is in a class all its own. And not just because it has a scifi slant to it. It's just exceptionally entertaining.John Simm is a real gem of an actor. What a treat to come across him in this performance. There are a lot of scenes in which he's quite emotional and it fits perfectly with the whole feel of the show. It has a perfect balance between the all-out ballsiness of the crude policing style of the era and the locale and the touches of nostalgia in reverse for the current state of policing.Kudos to the writers for their originality and daring to mix a touch of sci-fi with a gritty and irreverent British police drama.The ending is the most brilliant part. It is even more enigmatic than the finale of Lost. In Life on Mars, the ending lends itself to multiple speculations. Just when you think you've figured out what was really going on you realize, no, that's not possible because...wait a minute...what if...You get the idea. Just watch it and see what theory you come up with.

jax713 Here is an entertaining drama highlighted with a sci-fi aura that is primarily a character study, and certainly not your typical crime show. Once you get into the series, you find you don't care as much about solving the crimes as you care about what happens to the characters. Though the backbone of the story is a cop transported back to 1973 where he has to adapt to what are the now-revolting police tactics, sex discrimination, and lack of technology of that era, the thing that keeps you glued to the screen is watching the characters cavort. Without the intensely committed acting skills of the two leads, John Simm and Philip Glenister, this series might have lost its wow-factor. Each in his own way brings a palatable emotional reality to what might otherwise have been a flight of fancy, and the relationship that builds between their characters is smart and convincing. You almost feel like standing and applauding in front of your TV after each episode just from watching them interplay.The scripts, too, are peppered with genius because they make a certain sense of time travel, of meeting one's self in the past, of being able to change certain events without changing the whole world, of cognizance in two vastly different time spectrums. The writers succeed in plotting intelligent twists mounted atop common sense to keep the action moving and, thankfully, giving us a fully satisfying ending.The one complaint I have with the series is the overload of 70's music at each and every interlude of dialog. It's as if they wanted to insert a few seconds of every chart-topper of 1973 and I found it annoyingly intrusive and grating because, though the lyrics may be relevant to the scene, the tempo frequently is not. 8 out of 10