Television series

Life on Mars

Name: Life on Mars
Genre: Drama, Crime, Science Fiction
Released: 2006
Cast: John Simm, Philip Glenister, Marshall Lancaster, Dean Andrews, Liz White

Time-travel sci-fi

A shape-shifting hybrid of cop show and existential puzzle box. Detective Sam Tyler is hit by a car in present-day Manchester and wakes up in 1973, in a job he supposedly already has, under a boss who solves crime with his fists. Coma, time travel, or madness — the show refuses to fully answer, and is warmer, funnier, and sadder for it.

TVMaze rating

4.0

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you enjoy crime shows where the procedural machinery is a vehicle for a sharper, stranger question about who you are, and you don't mind a lead who is more irritating than heroic.

Skip it if you want a clean, self-contained case each week; the mysteries here are often secondary to the central puzzle, and the period-bound banter can feel like a lot of shouting in a bad jacket.

What it asks of you: Sixteen hour-long episodes across two series, so it asks for a sustained commitment, and it rewards staying with the slow build rather than hopping in for one sitting.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Ashes to Ashes2008

The direct sequel from the same creators — Gene Hunt gets a new fish-out-of-water cop to torment, brighter colours, London instead of Manchester, same engine running underneath.

But The overarching mystery gets more elaborate and eventually tries to explain itself — some viewers preferred the original's ambiguity.

Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 19802009

Same decade, same crooked Yorkshire police force, drained of every last bit of comfort-telly warmth — a brutal, brilliant look at what that corruption actually costs people.

But Unrelentingly bleak across three interlinked films, structurally demanding, and offers nothing resembling nostalgia or a joke.

Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1980 poster

Quantum Leap1989

The American granddaddy of 'stranded in another era, trying to get home' — period pastiche, an odd-couple dynamic, and a hero desperate to fix his own life by fixing someone else's.

But Much softer and more episodic, with the sci-fi rules fully explained rather than left to gnaw at — no real mystery to chase.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Life on Mars

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Prisoner1967

Both drop a man of the present into a constructed reality he can't leave or fully trust, and use that uncertainty to interrogate what 'home' and 'self' actually mean.

Patrick McGoohan wakes up in a beautiful, sinister village he can't leave, in a show that keeps circling the same question Life on Mars does: is this real, and does it matter if it isn't?

But Openly allegorical and often maddeningly opaque — it wants to unsettle you, not comfort you, and its ending divides people to this day.

Luther2010

Swap 1973 for now and Gene Hunt's fists for Idris Elba's coat — a huge, magnetic, morally compromised detective carrying a whole series on sheer charisma.

But Plots lean pulpy and occasionally absurd; if you liked the melancholy more than the swagger, this tips hard the other way.

Cracker1993

Robbie Coltrane's boozy, brilliant criminal psychologist is British TV's other great troubled-cop archetype, and the writing is just as sharp and sad underneath the humour.

But No time-travel hook at all — purely grounded procedural, so it won't scratch that particular itch.

Line of Duty2012

Takes the corruption plotline simmering under Life on Mars to its paranoid extreme — a slow-burn procedural about policing the police, with some of TV's best interrogation scenes.

But No period setting, no ambiguity about what's real, and it swaps warmth for pure, grinding tension.

The Bridge2010

A mismatched-partners cop show at its most stylish — different country, different decade, but the same pleasure of two incompatible detectives slowly earning each other's trust.

But Subtitled, slower, and entirely serious — none of the needle drops or jokes that soften the original.

Broadchurch2013

Another British crime drama that cares as much about grief and community as about whodunit, with the same strong, specific sense of place.

But A straight murder mystery with no fantastical element whatsoever — the resemblance is mood, not plot.

Slaughterhouse-Five1972

Strip away the police procedural and Sam Tyler's premise is Billy Pilgrim's: a mind possibly broken by catastrophe, refusing to settle into one time, using dislocation to process what actually happened.

Kurt Vonnegut's shell-shocked hero comes 'unstuck in time,' drifting between wartime trauma and an ordinary American life, in an adaptation as strange and tender as the novel.

But Not a cop show at all, with almost no plot momentum — it treats time-slippage as a serious meditation on trauma rather than a puzzle to solve.

Goodnight Sweetheart1993

Same structural joke as Life on Mars — a present-day man dropped into a lovingly recreated past, bluffing his way through slang and technology he doesn't have — but played here for cosiness instead of dread.

A sillier, cosier cousin — a modern-day electrician keeps stumbling through a gap in time into the London Blitz, living a double life between two eras, played entirely for warmth and laughs.

But A broad, gentle sitcom with none of the menace or ambiguity — pure comfort telly, not a puzzle box.