A Televisual Feast

“Ashes to Ashes” is kind of like The People That Time Forgot, with new time traveler (coma traveler?) Keeley Hawes in the Patrick Wayne role. Allow me to explain the analogy. In The Land That Time Forgot, Doug McClure writes a letter telling the whole world about his adventures with dinosaurs and so on. Before the action of People, Wayne reads the letter and knows everything to expect. Few surprises (until the end of the film). Well, as a series, “Ashes” is the same. Hawes knows everything from “Life on Mars” because of her unseen interactions with that program’s protagonist, except acts knowing she’s in a coma or whatever (the explanation here is she’s in shock, a minute from living or dying). It’s an absurd setup, mostly because series creator Matthew Graham really likes sucking the mystery from things (he and “Life on Mars” star John Simm disagreed on Graham’s read of the resolution).

Anyway, the problems with “Ashes” are legion. Too much time is spent resolving “Life on Mars” material. Too little time is spent making Hawes’s character appealing or believable (she decides, for example, she’s a minute from life or death based on information given to her by a hallucination). It’s stylistically problematic, mimicking cheap 1980s American TV shows instead of trying to set an actual mood.

There are good things, great things even. Except they’re the guys from “Life on Mars.” Philip Glenister is great–even if Gene Hunt is played as a joke now (there’s still some subtext, but Hawes and her story are drivel, though Hawes is fine). Marshall Lancaster, Dean Andrews… both still great. New addition Montserrat Lombard as Shaz, Lancaster’s Chris’s romantic (he wishes) interest, also great.

It’s a bad pilot and it needed to be great. Apparently, the creators are willing to do nothing but trade on earned, “Life on Mars” currency, which is, firstly, a lousy move artistically and, secondly, limited.

2.5