The first season of BBC America’s science fiction-tinged police procedural, “Life on Mars,” eluded me, possibly due to an eerie presentiment from a future 30 years hence when the show will be a staple of film school seminars on bad acting, bad writing, and rote thinking. Or perhaps it was just those mysterious, echoing phone calls I kept receiving in the middle of the night warning me to “Stay away … Stay away … Stay away …”

Whatever the reason, the series is back tonight for another go-round, with a double-barreled two-episode premiere to kick off the second season. It begins with a close-up of the mousy face of time-traveling Detective Inspector Sam Tyler (John Simm), caught in the throes of a nightmare somewhere in Manchester and howling, “Who are you?” To which the growling off-screen answer, presented in a dazzlingly sinister Mancusian accent, is: “I’m your worst nightmare.” It’s always good to know you’re in the hands of a first-class scriptwriter.

But then I must be completely blotto, as the Brits would say, because according to the raves this show has received across the pond, it’s a cracker. “I maintain that it is impossible to have a heartbeat and not love this show,” wrote the critic for the London Observer, who was pronounced dead on the scene shortly afterward. The television critic for the Guardian, presumably still alive and kicking, had this to say about “Life on Mars”: “Crisply scripted, funny, imaginative — why can’t more telly be like this?”

If the trouble with NBC’s time-traveling series, “Journeyman,” is that its reporter-hero never stays in one decade long enough for you to mix a dry martini before he’s back home in the present sheepishly explaining his latest absence to his wife, then the trouble with “Life on Mars” is that Detective Tyler — a fine, upstanding, politically progressive fellow who was mysteriously hurled back in time following a car crash — seems to be stuck in 1973 as if he were glued to it. And a dull, dreary version of 1973 it is. Everything looks gray and dim and dysfunctional, as if Britain had been part of the Soviet bloc, which some people, let’s not forget, rather wished it was. It’s so lackluster you want to say, “Forget the 1970s, let’s try the 1950s — it can’t be any worse than this.”

When it comes to revisiting the 1970s and other dollops of lost time, we seem to have an incurably divided view. Somehow we’re supposed to purse our lips disapprovingly at the plurality of white male faces and the paucity of empowered female and ethnic ones, while grooving to the fact that you can still drink, smoke, and wear fur. AMC’s 1960 advertising saga, “Mad Men,” was unable to resolve this dilemma, while CBS’s forthcoming series about free love in the 1970s, “Swingtown,” promises to take a less moralistic tack.

“Life on Mars” more or less follows the usual schizoid path, one flared trouser leg moving off to the left, the other to the right, while Tyler wears a perpetual sneer on his face as if he’s secretly dying to give these ’70s primitives a lecture on carbon emissions. Initially, I thought the show was going to be fun, especially early on, when Tyler’s superior officer, Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister), who bears a passing resemblance to the ’70s-era Gérard Depardieu, contemptuously shoves a journalist out of the way as if he were a piece of street trash rather than someone who might sue. “Do you keep a journalist chained in your basement?” the media-sensitive Tyler asks him. “I don’t have a basement,” Hunt replies. “That lot should stay off my back.”

Which isn’t exactly great writing. It would have been much better if he’d said, “Yes, I do. Come round for a drink later and I’ll show him to you.” But then, the show’s lure of a rough-and-tumble, no-questions-asked British police force free-for-all never really develops into anything more substantial than a routine police procedural with a hero who’s secretly from the 21st century and might as well go back there, for all we care.

bbernhard@earthlink.net