Okay, this is a spectacularly bad idea.

I can just imagine the pitch session. "Hey, there's this great British show called Life on Mars, a subtle and affecting time-travel/police drama that works on all sorts of different levels. But we can't show it on American television, because the characters all have accents. So let's hire the guy that gave us Ally McBeal and Lake Placid to make it slower, simpler, and dumb. It'll be a hit!"

Mark my words, the American remake (which will be horrible, no doubt about it) won't be set in the early seventies, like the original, but in the late seventies, so they can use disco music in the soundtrack. And if the characters all end up neurotic and unlikeable, well, that's just par for the course...