A mirror to Life on Mars

Watching the mildly entertaining Man on the Inside on Netflix, I was struck by a painful mirror image of the bad old days. In the series Ted Danson plays a bored, retired engineering professor who takes on a job as an undercover investigator for a PI to investigate a theft in a retirement home. We get some stereotype old people behaviour, but also some embarrassingly hypocritical sexism.

I'll come back to that in a moment, but to put it into context, I've also recently been rewatching the excellent 2006/7 TV series Life on Mars. In the show, the 2006 detective Sam Tyler played by John Simm hallucinates himself into a 1970s Manchester police team after a brain injury, working under the wonderfully unreconstructed Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). Something Tyler constantly attempts to battle is the casual sexism of the male detectives, which (allegedly) had changed significantly by 2006.

Now back to Man on the Inside (made in 2024, not the distant past). Two female inhabitants of the retirement home are blatantly sexist, commenting on the body of a young man in a video, then getting a young male worker to plug something in, so that they can look at his rear end. Just imagine this had been the mirror image and old men had been discussing the body of a young woman - it would be absolutely creepy... and so was this.

Some might argue that it's okay because men got away with it for so long - but that's pure 'two wrongs don't make a right' territory. I do see this quite a lot where somehow it's considered okay for women to make remarks about men's looks that (rightly) would be totally unacceptable the other way round. At least Life on Mars was critiquing the 70s. But surely we've moved on since then?

Image by Brendan Church from Unsplash

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