The team behind "Life on Mars" says great pains were taken to make the new TV police drama look and feel like it is really taking place in 1973 New York City.

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Based on the former BBC series by the same name, the show casts Irish actor Jason O'Mara as a contemporary New York cop who finds himself inexplicably fighting crime decades earlier after he is hit by a car.

"If there's one thing that was really, really important to us, (it) was not doing a send-up of the 70s, not doing a parody of it, but actually doing something that felt like it just sort of lived organically in the time," executive producer Josh Appelbaum told reporters in a recent teleconference. "It's not all about lava lamps and bellbottoms and that kind of stuff. It feels, you know, just sort of authentically like you're there and we're not trying to make a wink-wink to the audience about it."

"To me, what I've been seeing is not just perhaps how 1973 actually was back then, but how 1973 was portrayed through the movies of the time -- the 1973 look of a movie at that time like 'Serpico' and 'French Connection,'" added O'Mara. "It evokes something sort of nostalgic and romantic, while also being sort of gritty and dangerous."