Half the inaugural season of Ashes to Ashes has debuted in Britain, and it's safe to say that this show is not only a worthy successor to Life on Mars, it's better.
Sort of a sequel and sort of a new show, Ashes to Ashes fixes what little there was that was wrong with Life on Mars. And oddly enough, although Keeley Hawes makes a spectacular leading lady, it turns out the connecting thread of these shows is Philip Glenister as Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt.
In fact, the two shows will now be known as the Gene Hunt saga. Glenister's Hunt was a 1970's anachronism in the two seasons of Life on Mars. A do-gooder who'd do bad to get the bad guys, he typified the kind of TV cop of the time. Loud, bullyish and quick with the quip. He led a squad of Manchester cops not too divorced from the strike team on The Shield. But his boys were basically morons with badges, leaving him as the brains of the outfit. John Simm's Sam Tyler, a cop from the 21st century, was injected into the setup and a clash of styles became inevitable and inevitably entertaining.
Cut to this season. Detective Alex Drake, well familiar with Tyler's case, suffers the same fate as Tyler. She is shot. She wakes up in the past. This time in 1980's London. To her surprise, and our delight, she meets up with three figments (?) of Tyler's imagination. DCI Hunt, and two of the loopiest of his squadron, the cops played by Dean Andrews and Marshall Lancaster. Of the two, Lancaster's Chris Skelton is the slightly more evolved. But barely. On the other hand, Hunt seems to have mastered some levels of self-control.
Unless it's at the wheels of a car, which is driven around town like the old Starsky and Hutch vehicle.
At any rate, Drake's either clinging to life in a hospital room and dreaming up Hunt and Company, or we have another case of time travel. Same premise, but waaaaaay different execution.
Undoubtedly, Drake looks better in a tight 80's era pair of blue jeans, or a mini-skirt, for that matter. She favours off-the-shoulder tops and a white leather jacket. Her hair is a friz of brown curls and her expressive eyes came at you from blue-shadowed lids. And underneath all of that is Zoey from the first few seasons of Spooks.
Keeley Hawes, is indeed, a bit of a chameleon. It took me TWO full episodes before I realized knockout Alex and mousy little Zoey were played by the same actress. Hawes just exhudes sexual energy in this show, and a good part of the charm of the show is figuring out when (and what will ensue) when she and Glenister's Hunt finally clinch and kiss. For the time, they've been doing the Sam and Diane act, coming close in each of the last two episodes, despite the abhorrence she holds for Hunt's tactics.
The other bit that makes this show better is a reduction of the amount of the show given to Drake's fevered dreams, starring her daughter and a clown (the one made famous by David Bowie). Tyler would consume ten minutes of a fifty-minute episode with fevered attempts to communicate with the now. That's significantly cut in Ashes to Ashes, for the better. We GET it, we don't have to be hit over the head with it. There's also the thread running through were Alex KNOWS she's in a dream, and can do and say things, knowing it's all imaginary.
Naturally, like Sam Tyler, Alex Drake tries to re-connect with her parents, given the opportunity. In fact, we know her parents are doomed to die in a car-bomb. Can the past be changed? Can Alex survive finding out her parents were not paragons of virtue, the same fate having just befallen her godfather? Just how incestuous would it be to kiss said godfather, BEFORE he becomes your godfather? These are all stories to be told in the next month.
Ashes to Ashes is certainly worthy of a multi-year run. It does point out just how horrible fashions were back then. It was also the start of the Computer Age. It's interesting in retrospect, despite the music. And I could watch Keeley Hawes play Alex Drake for a l-o-o-o-n-g time. But word has come down that Glenister figures this is the last decade to watch Hunt flounder around in. He wants to be killed off, ere they come up with yet a third shooting victim to watch him dodder around in the 1990's. That presages no more than another season of Ashes to Ashes, let alone a third series.
But I'm already imagining Hunt as a retired copper turned private detective. I guess it'd have to be a kid going back in time. The mind wanders ...
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