By Mr. Sobell
I don't know how your Thursday went, but it couldn't have been as bad as what Sam Tyler experienced. Don't believe me? Okay -- at any point during the day were you hit by a car that either caused you to hurtle past the bounds of time and space back into 1973, or put you in a coma, or some combination of the two? No? Well, all right then.
So here's the scoop: Sam Tyler is a New York City detective and he and his lady friend Maya are hot on the trail a serial killer. (No, this isn't part of some weird Take Your Girlfriend to Work program; she's a detective, too.) Well, the serial killer skates on some flimsy, ultimately bogus alibi, and when Maya tries tracking him, she disappears. Sam drives off to find her, with the strains of David Bowie blasting on his stereo system -- one guess as to what the title of the song is, and, no, "Fame '90" is not an acceptable answer. Anyway, he arrives at the scene, gets hit by the aforementioned car, and the thing you know, he's waking up dressed in the latest from Macy's Starsky & Hutch collection.
And, oh, the wacky differences between 1973 and 2008. They listen to 8-track tapes, and we listen to iPods! They have rotary telephones, and we have mobile devices! They callously ignore a person's Constitutional rights by coercing confessions and revelations through brutality and bullying, and we... have a lot in common with 1973, actually.
Of course, all this could just be in Sam's head -- he occasionally hears voices on the TV or over the radio referring specifically to him and his vegetative state, and they won't acknowledge him, no matter how loudly he shouts back or pleads with them to help him get home. You can imagine how much this endears him to his new 1973-era colleagues on the force.
Anyhow, 1973 or mind-altering coma, Sam's still a cop, and he's called on to investigate a woman-abducting creep who's committing crimes in a mighty similar way to our 2008 perp. Turns out, our Watergate-era criminal is the -door neighbor of the little kid who grows up to be the Serial Killer of the Aughties, so Sam briefly mulls the possibility of filling the little tyke full of lead, so that he can save the future and quite possibly his girlfriend. But just as he's fiddling with the gun, Maya's voice comes over the AM dial in his car to tell him that she's okay. So everything's all right, with the possible exception of Sam still being stuck in 1973.
Of course, if you had just watched the British version, you would have already known all that. So what are you doing reading this again?
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