Sam Tyler (Jason O'Mara) is a New York cop; his current case involves a serial killer who abducts and murders young women, a case that takes on added urgency when his partner/girlfriend (Lisa Bonet) is kidnapped. On his way to the apartment of the prime suspect, Tyler is hit by a car. When he wakes up, he finds himself in 1973.
Police work in 1973 was a very different thing, and Sam has trouble adjusting to work with no computers or high-tech DNA information. Even worse are the attitudes; Sam's new partner, Ray Carling (Michael Imperioli, wearing a hideous period mustache), thinks nothing of beating up a suspect, and the station commander, Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel, who hasn't learned yet how to scale his performance down to TV size), is even worse.
The show's most interesting character is policewoman Annie Norris (Gretchen Mol). In 1973, policewomen were limited to rescuing kittens and running pointless errands for their male colleagues. Annie's clearly capable of more; she's got a psychology degree from Fordham, and has the skills and smarts to do what we now call profiling. When called on by Sam to do just that, though, she's furious at him for bringing attention to abilities that her male colleagues aren't ready to recognize in a woman.
Sam can't figure out how he got to 1973, and of course, every one thinks he's nuts when he tries to explain what's happened to him. There are hints that he's still alive in 2008 -- he occasionally hears voices from his real voice talking to him from the TV or radio -- but we're given no definite answer to the mystery.
That, it seems to me, will be the show's ultimate downfall. How long can it go on without giving us some sort of resolution to that central mystery? I was already getting bored with the puzzle by the end of the first episode, and I can't imagine watching Sam bumble along in 1973 for too many more weeks without an answer.
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