Spend time on 'Mars'

Here’s the concept: Cop is hit by a car while investigating a murder. When he comes to, it’s 1973. He awakens in period clothes, gets in his period car and drives back to the dusty, smoke-filled station where nobody, period, has heard of solving crimes with DNA.

And that’s just the kickoff to “Life on Mars,” an addictive cop show imported from our political and television allies in Great Britain, premiering at 9 p.m. CT Monday on BBC America.

It’s the story of Sam Tyler (John Simm), who we gather is lying in a coma back in the parallel universe where he started. Every now and then he receives a message from that world — sometimes through the police radio, sometimes through one of the massive state-owned telephone receivers imposed on the citizens of Manchester in 1973. And sometimes Sam is jarred from his sleep by the odd little girl who appeared on the BBC’s test pattern after signoff. (You do remember when TV stations signed off, don’t you?)

Every time, the message is the same: Fight, Sam. Fight for your life.

But while Sam hangs onto his existence in 2006 by a respirator, in 1973-land he is a man solving crimes for a brute named Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). Hunt, an aggressive, hard-drinking inspector, embodies the pre-“CSI” school. He considers Sam, with his fascination for examining corpses and adherence to procedure, a bit of a patsy.

“I trust my instincts,” Hunt huffs, and when Sam challenges him with logic, his boss responds the only way he knows how — by pummeling Sam with his fists. Forensics in 1973 strikes Hunt as theoretical rubbish, a waste of time for today’s modern detective. He constantly overrules Sam’s explanations with his own harebrained but internally logical substitutes, like the deduction that the first person to mention the crime is the one who did it.

The culture clash between these two men is a source of ongoing entertainment on the show. So is the soundtrack, of which the 1973 David Bowie single “Life on Mars” is just the beginning. The songs featured here would make for a terrific long-playing record ... I mean, podcast.

If the show were just “Tops of the Pops” salted with Diet Coke and Playstation jokes, it would be a mere confection. (That reminds me to mention that David “Ally McBeal Boston Legal” Kelley owns the U.S. rights to “Life on Mars.”)

This BBC version is more. It’s an ambitious and ever-shifting examination of the lack of foresight in a culture addicted to rapid change.

Sam at first fails to recognize that he has some baggage, and that he must unpack it at the Hotel Throwback before the present day will readmit him and let him close that case he was working on.

When a hostage taker tells him, “Some people walk among the living dead, and don’t even know it,” Sam doesn’t quite grasp that he’s talking about Sam, not himself.

But “Life on Mars” is not all psychodrama. In one episode Sam breaks up a nascent soccer gang and realizes he has diagnosed an early case of soccer hooliganism.

In another he’s gobsmacked when he pulls up to a textile factory.

“I live here,” Sam says. Maybe someday he does, but for now the factory is still in business, though its workers are already struggling to keep it open. Sam’s sense of unreality is heightened when he spots a 1973 version of himself walking the streets of Manchester. If little Sam Tyler is in his world, does that mean the boy has clues that will solve the mystery of why he is here?

You get the sense that Sam’s character is not lacking for courage but insight. He wants to fight; he’s just not sure who, or what, he should be fighting.

That is the life-or-death mystery that binds “Life on Mars” to our own age, as we stumble through the fog of culture rife with information and short on wisdom.