March 10, 2008
SPOILER ALERT:
‘Mad Men’, Gene Hunt and Other Men (David Herman, March 10, 2008, Prospect Blog)
What do ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Life on Mars’/'Ashes to Ashes’ have in common? They are both among the best TV dramas in the last decade. And they both use the past to find a way of talking about men today. [...]Move forward to Manchester 1973 and the BBC’s cop drama with a twist, ‘Life on Mars’. At first glance, you might have thought that the smart, politically correct Sam Tyler would be the hero in every sense, juxtaposed with the unreconstructed policemen from 1970s Manchester with their Stone Age attitudes. of course, it turned out otherwise. Sam Tyler was just annoying with his ‘I told you so’, Guardian whining. It was Gene Hunt (superbly played by Philip Glenister) , who caught viewers’ imaginations. with his cheery political incorrectness.
What made it perhaps the most television program ever broadcast -- even aside from being a two year long anti-euthanasia polemic with an integral anti-abortion episode -- is that the series ultimately turned not on the question of whether Sam would live but whether Hunt should. In the context of European political correctness in particular, Sam's spectacularly enacted decision to return to the '70s was extraordinarily radical.