It’s all too easy for those who dismiss U.S. television and the culture as a whole as leftist, immoral, and fattening to pick and choose (and misinterpret) episodes and scenes that seem to confirm their assumption that the culture is overwhelmingly awful. The ABC TV police/fantasy drama series Life on Mars, for example, provides some tempting apples for pop culture-haters to pluck.
For instance, episode three, “My Maharishi Is Bigger Than Your Maharishi,” was an agonizingly earnest appeal for tolerance toward homosexuals (which is of course laudable) which included some dubious propositions about the causes and consequences of homosexuality and social attitudes toward it. The episode sent out a big invitation for undiscerning opponents of pop culture to point to Life on Mars as evidence of an ongoing leftist conspiracy to destroy the nation through cultural promulgation of radical, transformative ideas and values.
Fortunately, it seems few were watching that one.
The real problem is that Life on Mars, like the culture itself, is much more varied and well-intended than the haters are willing to see, much less acknowledge. Several recent episodes of the show provide ample evidence.
For example, in episode five, “Things to Do in New York When You Think You’re Dead,” protagonist Sam Tyler, a modern-day New York City policeman who has mysteriously been transported back in time to the 1970s, pursues a Puerto Rican manual laborer named Angel who is accused of killing a nine-year-old black girl, an incident that threatens to spark a race riot whipped up by a radio personality known as Brother Lovebutter (yikes!).
Also among the antagonists are a sinister group of black gangsters calling themselves the Black Liberation Army. The lack of illusions about black radicals of the time is laudable.
In their pursuit of Angel, Sam and Capt. Gene Hunt meet Father Tim, a Catholic priest who displays courage, integrity, trustworthiness, and sound judgment. Spurred on by Brother Lovebutter’s rantings and Angel’s escape from custody, the riots break out as feared. Amid the confusion, Sam encounters a wino who tells him he might already be dead but just not realize it (a reference to the show’s central mystery, Sam’s time-transfer from today to the ’70s).
Sam then talks with Father Tim, who provides some useful information after a serious effort to help Sam understand why the detective has lost his faith in God, and to suggest to Sam that he is in fact on a quest to find a truth he knows is there but of which he has lost sight.
The story is resolved by the planned, public, redemptive sacrifice of Angel’s life (a clear Christ reference, although given that the real story already happened, this one is actually a scheme devised by Gene Hunt to stop the riot, and Angel is not killed).
After the redemptive rescue, Angel tells Sam that God miraculously sent Sam to save him in answer to Angel’s prayers. The wino turns out to be an angel who takes Keisha’s soul to the next life. The wino tells Sam that he heard his prayers and came to give Sam a chance to say goodbye to his mentor, a police captain who has died in the present day and with whom Sam has been working during the Angel case.
Sam is shown praying that night, asking God to help him find his way home. Certainly this episode constitutes a positive and rather sophisticated treatment of religion and the foundations of personal faith.
Similarly salutary is the treatment of sensuality and the rock-and-roll lifestyle in episode 10, “Let All the Children Boogie,” in which an androgynous, hedonistic rock star based on glam rockers such as David Bowie and Marc Bolan turns out to be quite sensible and smart and a clever practitioner of capitalism.
And in episode 13, “Revenge of Broken Jaw,” a case involving bomb threats against the police has a group of student radicals as the villains, led by a smug female college professor who is drawn from ample examples of the time. The professor has led her followers to commit the murders, by bombing, of four police officers whom she was all too eager to believe murdered a student radical a year earlier. The officers were innocent, however, and the professor turns out to be even worse than her nitwit radical students.
Here again the show tells a story in which smug political radicals create terrible harm which is ended only by the hardworking and unappreciated police.
Unfortunately, and perhaps attributable to less salubrious and sensible episodes such as the “My Maharishi” clunker (as well as the general lameness of ABC, which tries so hard to be hip that its programming is largely ridiculous), Life on Mars never really developed a strong audience following and has been canceled. The good news is that ABC is allowing the show to finish its run, which will conclude with an episode resolving the story, explaining how and presumably why Sam was transported back in time, with a possible return home for him.
For all its faults, Life on Mars has done some very good things. A fair evaluation of the show and popular culture as a whole must acknowledge such positive developments.