Lazarus Review – This Harlan Coben adaptation is so sad | TV and radio

DAmy Edna Everage (and if you’re too young to know the star housewife who was Barry Humphrys’ magnum opus, go on YouTube and see her glory, you possum) once begged South Bank Show presenter and prolific novelist Melvyn Bragg to stop writing: “Give us all a chance to catch up.”

I feel the same way about Harlan Coben’s television career. With the possible review that once we become aware of it, if he does not feel refreshed enough to give us something better than Lazarus, he can extend his hiatus until full reactivation is achieved.

Coben, a well-known writer of mystery and thrillers, including the authoritative Myron Bolitar series, signed a five-year, 14-book deal with Netflix in 2018. It was extended for another four years in 2022, bringing Bolitar Books under its auspices. We’re 10 edits into it. They usually star Richard Armitage and other strong actors doing their best with scripts that seem to have been stripped of Coben’s storytelling prowess, and if they weren’t actually written by a room full of monkeys, then certainly patched together.

However, a person cannot survive alone with a multi-million dollar Netflix deal, so Cobain has also been busy working with Amazon. This resulted in the 2023 Shelter series, based on Myron Bolitar’s son Mickey’s debut novel. Now comes “Lazarus” from the ground up, written by Danny Brocklehurst, with whom Coben previously collaborated on Safe, The Stranger (starring Richard Armitage as a man whose wife feigns pregnancy and then disappears) and Fool Me One (Armitage as a presumed dead man who reappears on his nanny cam and then disappears again).

Lazarus stars Sam Claflin as a psychiatrist, who I’m afraid I have to tell you is named Joel Lazarus (“Laz”) and he is the son of another psychiatrist named Dr. Jonathan Lazarus (Bill Nighy). “I suppose, in choosing your profession, you wanted to be like him,” Brocklehurst writes and someone reads aloud.

Laz was the first to arrive at the scene of his sister’s murder in 1998, and guess what, he’s been haunting him ever since. The killer was seen fleeing the scene, although they were never caught.

When we meet him in the present, Dr. Jonathan has just died by his own hand — let me know if I should really add “apparently” here — and left a note saying “It’s not over” and a drawing of a milking chair. Another character attempts to pre-empt viewers’ criticism by commenting that the man may have gone too far in his lifelong love of mystery. This viewer doesn’t think this distracts from the stressful nature of everything so far, to say the least.

As Laz sits contemplating in his late father’s office, a patient arrives for her appointment. She doesn’t seem to notice that it’s not Dr. Jonathan, and ignores all his attempts to intervene as she unloads her murderous feelings on her partner, Neil, and her fear that someone else is stalking her. Imagine Laz’s surprise when he dug up her notes the next day and discovered that his father had last seen her in 1999 and that she had been murdered shortly thereafter! So he couldn’t see her last night! what is going on?

What’s happening is this kind of excitement. Sadness appears as From the previous machine They appear as plot points/solutions until a rational but perhaps still unconvincing explanation is finally pulled out of the bag. How much you enjoy this sort of thing depends on whether you feel that ghosts providing clues and the living giving valuable insights is a new twist on the mystery-thriller formula, or whether you feel it’s lazy writing bordering on contempt from people who should know and are undoubtedly better paid than this.

Either way, Lazarus is very poorly paced and very repetitive: characters tell each other things we’ve just seen, many times over, endlessly treading on ancient ground to stretch it out to the requisite six episodes (there are flashbacks for flashbacks). Overall, this is delicate, delicate stuff. There is barely a moment of tension – how can there be a setting that allows a vision to appear at any moment and tell the protagonist what to do or who to look at next? Unexpected events abound even in the real world. I would like to meet the man, for example, who would allow a psychiatrist tracking down his father’s former patient to take an ax to a partition wall in the attic without objection. And a police department that doesn’t take a swab from the hand of a dead man who supposedly shot himself despite not owning a gun and showing no sign of ever having had mental health issues, and – well, etc.

The biblical Lazarus is of course famous for his resurrection from the dead. I think this person should accept his fate.