p>"Can a series finale make a show jump the shark?" asks my colleague Mickey O'Connor, referring to ABC's wackadoo Life on Mars wrap-up, in which we discover that time-traveling cop Sam Tyler is actually an astronaut from the year 2035 on his way to Mars. Cue the David Bowie; it's going to be a wild ride.
You see, in order to make the two-year-long journey more bearable, the astronauts upload a type of virtual-reality vacation for the brain. In Sam's case, he thought it would be cool to be a cop "way back" in 2008. But of all the luck, the ship hit an asteroid field or something, which rejiggered the program's calendar, sending Future Sam even further back into the past — to 1973.
Nevertheless, there are some nice touches. Tyler's copilots on the 2035 Mars probe are played by the same actors from the 125, including Michael Imperioli, Gretchen Mol and Harvey Keitel — who, it's revealed, is actually Sam's father. But otherwise, the finale reveals that the entire show as we knew it was a fiction. All those cases and characters and complications never existed. (Poor Lisa Bonet!)
What did you think of the Life on Mars finale? Refreshingly original or an idea past its time?
Give us your thoughts after the jump.
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Wednesday's ratings recap:
8 pm/ET
CBS' I Get That a Lot, in which celebs played jokes on us regular peeps, got enough viewers — 10.34 million — to win the hour. Lie to Me placed second with 8.98 mil, dipping 10 percent from its previous outing.
A Law & Order: CI repeat (5.06 mil) delivered nearly double what the now-canceled Chopping Block had been getting. ABC's Scrubs scored 5.05 mil, discharging 280K, while Better Off Ted held steady at 4.7 mil. Top Model surged 38 percent, to 3.95 mil.
9 pm
American Idol delivered 23.7 million viewers, down 6 percent from last week's results show. Opposite (and yet trailing) a Criminal Minds repeat, Lost found 9.35 million heads, up 6 percent week-to-week. Life, meanwhile, taunted the "bubble" with a 29 percent gain, hitting 5.57 mil.
10 pm
As CSI: NY and Law & Order served leftovers, Life on Mars said goodbye to 5.86 million viewers, adding 190 thou in its last hurrah.
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Pedro
8 pm/ET MTV
No Real World alum has had a more lasting impact than San Francisco cast member Pedro Zamora (1972-94), one of the first openly gay HIV-positive men to appear on national television. After being diagnosed with the disease at age 17, he dedicated the rest of his entirely too-short life raising AIDS awareness among young people. This touching biographical docudrama chronicles the extraordinary life of the man who helped humanize the disease and vowed to "keep the cameras going every step of the way, no matter how bad it gets."
Read on for previews of I Get That a Lot, Damages, RENO 911! and Life on Mars.
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In a rare instance of mutual forethought and cooperation between producers and a network, ABC's Life on Mars will wrap up its abbreviated freshman run this Wednesday at 10 pm/ET with a proper series finale, bringing to a close Detective Sam Tyler's time-tripping odyssey. Here, executive producers Scott Rosenberg and Josh Appelbaum reflect on their Mars journey, reveal the one song that done them wrong, preview the "straight-out scary" follow-up they have planned, and promise closure for fans of their previous project, October Road.
TVGuide.com: The episode airing this Wednesday, is it more or less what you had envisioned the series finale as being? Or is it slightly different, if only because you had less time to build up to it?
Josh Appelbaum: We always knew that the season finale was going to be this episode, and we always knew what our series finale would be. Basically we went to [ABC] and said, "Our ratings are grim. We want to ...
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