How To Watch Television

3. Life on Mars: Transnational Adaptation

30 3 Life on Mars Transnational Adaptation Christine Becker Abstract: Remaking foreign programs is a common strategy for American television producers, but we must consider the contexts of each nation’s industrial practices to fully understand such remakes. Christine Becker looks closely at both the British original and the American remake of Life on Mars to explore how contrasting norms of scheduling and serial formats help explain the differences in both storytelling and popular success between the two versions. With the exception of the soap opera format, television dramas in Britain largely operate as short-run series, with as few as six episodes constituting a single “season,” and only one or a handful of seasons making up the entirety of a program’s run.1 As a result, writers for such series can plot out prescribed endpoints to stories before launching production. In contrast to this “definite end” model, American network television generally operates through the “infinite middle” model, wherein writers for successful programs have to continually devise ways to delay the narrative endpoint in order to keep the show running for over twenty episodes a season, year after year, while also bearing in mind that a show could be cancelled at virtually any time. As Russell Davies, the creator of the British Queer as Folk (Channel 4, 1999– 2000), said of the American remake (Showtime, 2000–2005) at the latter’s onset: “The most important thing is to think of the U.S. version as a new show, a different show. Even before they’d written a word, a 22-episode series is a profoundly different thing, a different concept, to an eight-parter.”2 American remakes of British dramas thus throw into relief the challenge of translating a show from one storytelling mode and industrial practice into another . In particular, the ABC remake (2008–2009) of the BBC’s Life on Mars (2006–2007) offers a fruitful case study. Both versions have a nearly equal number of episodes: the British version ran for sixteen hour-long episodes split into two series units, and the U.S. season ran for seventeen 43-minute episodes before Life on Mars 31 cancellation. The latter circumstance further offers an example of what can occur when an American series transitions from an infinite-middle to a definite-end model in response to advance notice of cancellation. Might a similar number of episodes and a similar chance to implement a definitive ending result in similar narratives? To answer this question, I draw on formal analysis and consider industrial conditions in comparing the two Life on Mars productions in order to shed light on the impact that industry practices can have upon television narrative techniques . The essay will center in particular on narrative comparisons of three sets of paired episodes: the premiere episodes; two climatic middle episodes (in the British version, the series one finale and in the U.S. version, the last episode that aired before the two-month-long mid-season hiatus); and the series finales. The initial premise of both series is the same: a police detective named Sam Tyler is hit by a car in the present day, and when he wakes up from the accident, he inexplicably finds himself in 1973. He is still in the same city and still Sam Tyler but assumed by those in his precinct, which is still the same as before the accident , to be a detective just arriving on transfer from a town called Hyde. Across the course of the series, Sam must figure out how he can get back to the present and keep his wits about him in the process. While this broad premise is the same in both versions, several differences in the opening episodes point to substantial influences from the infinite-middle versus the definite-end storytelling models. Following the time travel opening, the primary narrative in each version of the first episode revolves around the 1973 search for a criminal suspect whom Sam believes to be responsible for kidnapping his fellow detective and girlfriend, Maya, in the present. Throughout both versions, Sam keeps seeing and hearing hospital sights and sounds, such as a heart monitor and doctors treating a patient, transmitted via radios and TV sets. Thus, it is implied that Sam is in a coma in the present and that the 1973 past is merely a creation of his unconscious imagination . Both Sams come to believe by episode’s end that killing themselves in the past world will...