Dame Edna Everage (and if you are too young to know of the housewife superstar that was Barry Humphries’ greatest creation, get yourselves to YouTube and gaze upon her glory, possums) 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 TV career. With the possible revision that once we have caught up, if he doesn’t feel refreshed enough to give us something better than Lazarus, he could extend his hiatus until full reinvigoration has been achieved.
Coben, an established writer of mystery novels and thrillers, including the dependable Myron Bolitar series, signed a five-year, 14-book adaptation deal with Netflix in 2018. This was extended for a further four years in 2022, bringing the Bolitar books under its aegis. We are 10 adaptations into that. They usually star Richard Armitage and other solid actors doing their best with scripts that appear to have been stripped of Coben’s storytelling prowess and, if not actually typed by a roomful of a monkeys, then definitely patched together by them.
Still, man cannot live by multimillion-dollar Netflix deal alone, so Coben has also been busy working with Amazon. This resulted in 2023’s series Shelter, based on the first Mickey-son-of-Myron Bolitar novel. Now comes the from-scratch creation Lazarus, written by Danny Brocklehurst, with whom Coben previously collaborated on Safe, The Stranger (starring Richard Armitage as a man whose wife fakes her pregnancy then disappears) and Fool Me Once (Armitage as a supposedly dead man who reappears on his child’s nanny-cam then disappears again).
Lazarus stars Sam Claflin as a psychiatrist, whom I am afraid I must tell you is called Joel Lazarus (“Laz”) and is the son of another psychiatrist, called Dr Jonathan Lazarus (Bill Nighy). “I suppose, choosing your career, you wanted to be like him” is some typing by Brocklehurst that someone reads aloud.
Laz was the first on the scene of his sister’s murder in 1998 and, guess what, it has haunted him ever since. He saw the murderer flee the scene, though 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 actually have to add “apparently” here – leaving a note that says “it’s not over” and a drawing of a milking stool. Another character tries to pre-empt viewerly criticism by commenting that the man may have taken his lifetime love of the cryptic too far. This viewer does not think this distracts from the effortful nature of everything so far in the slightest.
As Laz sits contemplatively in his late father’s study, a patient arrives for her appointment. She does not seem to notice that he is not Dr Jonathan, and ignores all his attempts to interject as she unloads her murderous feelings for her partner, Neil, and her fear that another person is stalking her. Imagine our Laz’s surprise when he digs out her notes the next day and discovers that his father last saw her in 1999 and that she was murdered shortly thereafter! So he couldn’t have seen her last night! What is going on?
What is going on is That Kind of Thriller. Grief manifesting as dei ex machina manifesting as plot points/solutions until a rational yet probably still unconvincing explanation is pulled out of the bag at the end. How much you enjoy this sort of thing depends on whether you feel ghosts delivering clues and giving the living valuable insights is a novel twist on the mystery-thriller formula, or whether you feel it is lazy writing bordering on the contemptuous from people who should know and are undoubtedly being paid better than this.
Either way, Lazarus is woefully badly paced and deeply repetitive: characters tell each other things we have just seen, many, many times, and tread endlessly over old ground to stretch the thing to the mandated six episodes (there are flashbacks to flashbacks). Altogether this is thin, thin stuff. There is barely a moment of tension – how can there be in a setup that allows for a vision to appear at any moment and tell a protagonist what to do or who to look at next? – and unlikely happenings abound even in the real world. I would like to meet the man, for example, who would let a psychiatrist on the trail of his dad’s former patient take an axe to a partition wall in the attic without demur. And the 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 having shown no sign of mental health struggles before, and – well, and so on.
The biblical Lazarus is, of course, famous for rising from the dead. I think this one should accept its fate.
• Harlan Coben’s Lazarus is on Prime Video now.
