Mickey Mouse Has Grown Up a Cow

One of the nice things about being a television writer is that sitting on your couch watching TV actually, no fooling, counts as research.

Now there are two types of writers I know. The first, and I think more prevalent type, are the ones who try to avoid watching anything similar when they're writing a script. A friend of mine who was developing a show about male friends avoided watching Entourage til his show was solid. If you're writing a cop show, you don't watch CSI or Law & Order, because you don't want to be influenced.

This kind of self-censorship, by the way, is way easier than actually trying to remember where your ideas come from. If you're aware of your ideas flowing, I find the spigot tends to get all crusty. And nobody wants a crusty spigot. There's a cream for that, but it smells kind of bad.

The easiest stories of unintentional influence come in the songwriting realm. A few years ago, the Stones settled because they unknowingly wrote a song that had more than a passing reference to the chord changes in a k.d. lang song...they settled becuase they thought, "yup, that probably did influence us." Not stole, understand. Influenced.

There was a similar thing years ago between Robert Palmer and Rod Stewart. Palmer recorded a song that sounded a whole lot like Rod's "Some Guys Have All the Luck," which, it turned out, was being recorded in the studio next door while Palmer was working there... the point is, the hyper-awareness of your creative process and "where things come from" is the first thing you have to let go of when you do this a lot. Because otherwise you'll go nuts before you ever get anything down on paper.

Every year I hear from some spec monkey about how their 'great idea' was stolen by so-and-so...never mind that the idea was a logical extension of what was in the news, or on the bestseller lists, or utterly derivative of something else... anyway, the point is that creativity and idea-generation cannot be a self-conscious exercise. And for some, when you're in that state, you can be highly suggestible. So those types tend to avoid similar stuff when they're creating.

I said there were two types of writers, and there are. I'm the second type. I love watching similar stuff when I'm working. Because you can find similarities in the strangest places, and strangest contexts. I find it makes me think about my own ideas in a different way -- and I don't really (or at least I don't think I do) become confused or hungup on what's coming from me and what's from them. I think that's because when I'm generating ideas and working them out, I can't really do anything else. I can barely read a Newspaper. But when things are banged into semi-coherent shape, I find that what helps me most is to watch things that have a similar element, but a vastly different treatment. It's almost like keeping yourself on the work track, while still being able to relax. Call it "recreationally staying in the wheelhouse."

One of my current projects is a show about a character in two eras. We play the story of the younger man in the 1960's against the story of him today in the 21st century, as an old man. Naturally, there's a mystery: something that happened then is having an effect now. And so on and so forth.

This script has been a real bear. I've done two of three episodes now, and the show's changed many times in development, as the broadcaster's vision of what they wanted evolved. At this point, I'm probably nine months into development on this, off and on...and it's easily the hardest thing I did in 2005.

So I eagerly and giddily tucked into a new BBC drama the other night. It's a show that I obtained through my highly placed TV monkey sources. I don't believe it's been on here yet. My guess is when it comes over to these shores, it'll likely show up on BBC America and BBC Canada.

Anyway, here's the premise of Life On Mars. Sam Tyler is a Detective Chief Inspector with the Manchester police force. They're chasing a serial killer. They get the wrong guy. His girlfriend, one of the other cops on the force, he's having an affair with her, see? And she has this idea that the suspect can lead them to the real killer, and...well, she gets nicked. And Sam is trying to collect himself, calm down, on the side of the road, see? And his Ipod is playing David Bowie's Life on Mars.

Then Sam steps out in the street and gets mowed down by a car.

When he wakes up, he's in 1973. His wallet says, Sam Tyler...he's a Detective Inspector, not a Chief Inspector. The highway he was beside hasn't been built yet. He wanders to the police station and finds a bunch of unrestructured, thug cops. There's no DNA testing...no computers, no mobile phones. Getting prints analysed takes two weeks. Everything's on Paper files.

What the hell is going on?

Through the course of the narrative, there's not just the fish out of water stuff, but there's also the ambiguous hints that , hey, is Sam in a coma inventing all this? Or did he somehow really travel back to 1973? There's evidence for both sides. What is true is that the case he was following in 2006 seems to have a connection here. But to follow that lead, he's going to need to convince his less sophisticated cop brethren to see through their swagger and embrace some new methods...like, oh, trusting women and stuff. Top performances from John Simm and Philip Gleinster.

The description doesn't make it sound like the best thing ever. But there's something haunting and terribly, terribly inventive about this show. For all the fooferal over Threshold and Invasion and the return of Sci Fi to tv -- Life On Mars is easily the trippiest and most compelling time travel thing I've seen in a while. A nice subversion of a lot of different genres and storytelling tropes...Life On Mars has more than a bit of Potter's amazing Singing Detective to it. There are seven more episodes to come. And I'll be looking forward to all of them.

And maybe they'll inspire me to return to my dual-era show with new vigour.

The Life On Mars site at BBC is here.