Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Lazarus Project’ On TNT, Where A Man Joins A Secret Organization That Turns Back Time To Save The World

by 24USATVJune 5, 2023, 4 a.m. 23
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Shows and movies with time jumps, especially ones where someone repeatedly relives the same day, weeks or months, make some people uneasy because of the idea that you live life for a time and then… you live it over again, completely aware that something isn’t right. In a new TNT thriller, a man finds out he has the ability to remember these time jumps and who’s been controlling them.

THE LAZARUS PROJECT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man and a woman in bed. When there’s a noise, the woman says, “The rubbish men are here,” then her hand lands on his face. He looks at his clock. It’s 7 AM on July 1.

The Gist: It’s an important day for George (Paapa Essiedu); he’s pitching his app to a bank for a business loan. His girlfriend Sarah (Charly Clive) tries to get him to relax by offering a flash of her tits if he makes her tea.

The pitch meeting, for a predictive stock performance app, goes well. Sarah finds out she’s pregnant. Then there’s a joyous wedding. But all is not well. A new global pandemic puts the UK in lockdown, and it seems to be worse than COVID ever was. By the holidays, everyone is in masks, hospitals are overwhelmed, and a pregnant Sarah is being rushed to an overcrowded ER, barely able to breathe.

All of a sudden, George wakes back up in bed with Sarah’s hand on his face. It’s July 1 again, but George remembers everything that just happened from July to December. It makes him completely paranoid, because he knows that the pandemic is coming. Things get so bad that he doesn’t get the loan and eventually Sarah leaves him. As he goes after Sarah, a woman named Archie (Anjli Mohindra) gives him a card with a building name on it and says he experienced a time jump, and if he experienced another one, he should go there.

Sure enough, he wakes up again on July 1, and he goes to the building. Archie introduces him to the other members of The Lazarus Project, who have the ability to turn back time whenever humanity is on the verge of extinction. July 1 is basically their checkpoint; they’ll keep going back to the previous July 1 as much as they need to save humanity, then when the emergency is over, time then moves forward, and the next July 1 becomes their new checkpoint. George is one of the very few people on the planet who can recall time jumps, and they can use that ability in the Lazarus Project.

He meets the group’s leader, Elisabeth ‘Wes’ Wesley (Caroline Quentin), and the other members: Blake (Lorn Macdonald), Greta (Salóme Gunnarsdóttir), Erik “The Dane” Erikson (Lukas Loughran) and Shiv (Rudi Dharmalingam). Shiv also has the same natural ability George has, but he’s got the serious manner of a man who’s seen some things.

Because of the time jumps, they have the time to help develop a vaccine, so they get past George’s first checkpoint as an agent. But there’s another threat; a nuclear warhead has been stolen by a former Lazarus agent named Rebrov (Tom Burke), who apparently isn’t the first agent to “go bad.”

An incident with Sarah’s coworker Ross (Brian Gleeson) almost leads Sarah to getting hit by a garbage truck at the school where Sarah and Ross work, but George grabs her at the last possible second. But when the Lazarus team tries to retrieve the nuke in Paris, Rebrov not only kills Archie and The Dane but sets off the bomb. Which means, of course, everyone goes back to the previous July 1. But George finds that didn’t happen before may happen now, and he may not be able to fix it.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Think Groundhog Day or Russian Doll but deadly serious.

Our Take: One of the things we appreciated about the first episode of The Lazarus Project is that writer Joe Barton (Giri/Haji, The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself) doesn’t torture George with dozens of time jumps before being introduced to The Lazarus Project. But what we also appreciate is that the first episode does just enough time jumping to set up what’s really going to happen in the series.

Yes, it’s about the fact that this group can turn back time to give itself the opportunity to save humanity. And there are rules involved in all this, some that are more vaguely defined than others. For instance, it seems that if you die before a time jump, you come back to life, and Lazarus Project members — who, except for George and Shiv, have been given this ability to remember jumps through artificial means — remember those deaths. How they’re not traumatized by that, we don’t know. Of course, if you die and the planet moves on to the next checkpoint, you’re out of luck, even if you’re a Lazarus team member.

That’s what is truly at play here. After Rebrov detonates that nuke, we get a time jump, which means that the incident with Sarah and Ross happens again, but this time, George doesn’t save her. If the threat of Rebrov is resolved this time around and the next checkpoint passes, Sarah will be gone forever.

So Barton is giving us a bit of a red herring by getting George involved with Lazarus. It’s what he does after Sarah dies, and who he turns to for help. that’s the real story here. And that’s certainly more intriguing than getting into the nitty gritty of just how Lazarus can do its thing. In fact, when George asks Archie how these time jumps work, the basically explains away things by telling him it’s a “singularity” and how it operates has to do with quantum physics, so “there’s really not much point in explaining it.” And with that sentence, Barton frees himself of having to do just that. The move is admirable in its obviousness, but it turns the show into more of an action series than a pedantic sci-fi show.

Essiedu is up to the task of playing George, who hasn’t seen as much of the world ending as Shiv has, but is soon going to learn that the personal consequences of having this “gift” are pretty vast. Mohindra is a good foil as Archie, and it seems that she gets to be one of the few who gets to fire off droll lines like “I’m a brown woman; why would I want to?” when George asks if they can go back to 1800s London.

Sex and Skin: We see Sarah and George having sex past the 2023 checkpoint, but it’s under the blanket with clothes on (the series was first developed for Sky in the UK and on basic cable here; that’s going to be all you get).

Parting Shot: Sarah gets hit by the garbage truck. George realizes what just happened, and we see him in slow motion turn around, silently yell “Sarah!” and run to where she got hit.

Sleeper Star: Rudi Dharmalingam’s Shiv is an interesting character, mainly because he’s seen the world end and knows that “it catches up with you.” It’s an entryway into examining just how this ability affects those who have it and why agents like Rebrov go rogue.

Most Pilot-y Line: After Rebrov sets off the nuke and time jumps, George calls Archie. “Holy shit, I got shot in the head!” she tells him with a bit of incredulousness but also a bit too matter-of-factly.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Because The Lazarus Project is more action thriller than sci-fi show, the mission that George goes on after Sarah dies will be interesting to watch, mainly because he may find himself in opposition to the group that constantly has to save humanity from itself.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

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