Two New TV Shows That Have Grabbed Me

Life On Mars is a cute new show this year. It's about a NYC detective who gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. Except for viewing the year right after my mission as though it was at fault not to have all the viewpoints and mores (pronounced MORays) of 2008, it's a pretty cute show with lots of nice cars, two inch revolvers, and girls with long, lovely hair and no clue. (At least they got those parts right. It was a great time to be a young man, even a harmless one.)

The guy keeps suspecting that the whole thing is an illusion and that he'll wake up any moment. But then he sees or feels something that proves it's a real experience. Occasionally he'll see someone flit by too fast to be a regular person, so he thinks he's catching views of what someone doesn't want him to see. He is anxious to get back to his girlfriend, but 1973 has charms of its own. Most of his fellow officers are portrayed as being near-Neanderthals in their attitudes about individual rights, forgetting to get warrants and neglecting to read someone their Miranda rights nine years after that decision, which, if memory serves, was handed down in 1964.

There was no need to make 1973 look like it was pre-Miranda. That show has already been made. It was called Crime Story. It ran for two seasons in the eighties and took place in 1963-64. Dennis Farina, who played Detective Fontana on Law & Order for a couple of years, was not the elegant clothes horse in that one that he was in L&O. He was just delightfully fierce. Anthony Denison, currently one of the many Lieutenants employed by the chief on The Closer, played Farina's chief antagonist, a rapidly rising young Mafioso who kills for the fun of it. It's still my favorite long-term enmity on film.

The other new show I like this year is called Fringe. As the name implies, it's a little out there, but I like it for that reason. It has elements of The X Files, but it also has traits I haven't seen before. The attractive people in it are all young, of course. The chief female's character works for a mysterious FBI leader who combines some of the characteristics of Mitch Pileggi (tough and bald) and the intense and angry black guy who succeeded the "Deep Throat" character whom Scully saw buy the farm on a bridge one night. The Science Fiction is first rate, at least to a non-scientific type like myself.

The most delightful character by far is an old coot named Walter, maybe my age, whose son is one of the agents and is embarrassed by the fact that his dad (whom he calls Walter to his face!) is a survivor of 25 years in the nut house and is still a nut. But the kid can't stop admiring his dad a little, because he's the mental equal or better of every high tech bad guy they trot out for the series. Walter's voice is quietly deep and he mixes an intense accumen with child-like wonder, even when truly disastrous results are pending if something goes wrong. The other night he was trying something for the very first time which was supposed to save a bunch of lives. He was loving every second of the experience! Someone asked him, "So, you're pretty sure this will work?" He laughed without losing focus and said, "Oh, of course not!" To him everything is a high school lab experiment. That it might result in massive death and/or destruction does not bother him, because it is beneath his interest.

One last thing about Fringe. When the scenes change, they have their very own signature method of telling you where you are. On X-Files the name of the locale would be printed across the bottom of the screen as you watched, each letter or number making a little click or beep, rather like an old teletype machine. On this new show, huge block letters naming the location appear to be a physical part of the set! If the new scene is at Harvard, big silver letters which seem to sit on the sidewalk in front of one of the buildings on campus, will loom in the picture for several seconds until the editors are sure you know what's going on. The commercials are short, too. They open with the almost whispered words, "Fringe will return in sixty (or ninety) seconds." And it does!