Dr. Joel "Laz" Lazarus is seeing ghosts, but at least they shouldn’t linger longer
than fifty minutes. Apparently, he is experiencing visions, or something, from
his late father’s life. Dr. Jonathan Lazarus was also a shrink, but his office
was clearly not a safe space. Some of the sessions were rather intense, but
they might help Laz identify his father’s killer, since his ghost can’t, or won’t
explain directly. Regardless, each visit to his late father’s office brings new
questions and often further family angst in Harlan Coben & Daniel Brocklehurst’s six-episode
Lazarus, which premiers today on Prime Video.
Old Man
Lazarus was supremely self-confident and he never owned a gun, so Laz considers
his supposed suicide highly unlikely. However, everyone knows the senior
Lazarus took the childhood murder of his daughter Sutton especially hard,
because she was his favorite. Of course, the cops know all about Sutton’s
murder, especially since DI Alison Brown is an old friend of the late doctor
and DS Seth McGovern is the other Dr. Lazarus’s childhood buddy. In fact,
McGovern still carries a torch for Laz’s other younger sister, Jenna, a psychic,
who is quite offended that the ghosts come to Laz instead of her.
It works
differently for old man Lazarus, who just walks up to Laz to start another
conversation from beyond the grave. Yet, in most cases, Laz takes his father’s
place in conversations from the past, experiencing them through his eyes.
Frankly, the first time it happens, he simply assumes he is talking to a
patient who is too crazy to tell him from his father. However, he soon learns
Cassandra Rhodes is dead—murdered in fact.
Frankly,
Laz is probably a little too confiding about the ghost business, especially to
McGovern. Of course, he will eventually need some kind of reason to explain finding
a corpse that has been hidden for over a decade. Meanwhile, Sam Olsen, the
original suspect in Sutton’s disappearance makes a suspicious habit of walking
around the late Dr. Lazarus’s office at all hours of the night.
Lazarus
is not exactly
horror per se, but it has enough of the supernatural and uncanny to feel
appropriately atmospheric for October viewing. Frankly, the first five episodes
are addictively bingeable. Coben and Brocklehurst dexterously dangle a juicy
new cliffhanger-revelation at the end of each episode. Unfortunately, the
concluding sixth installment plays out like it was conceived to disappoint, if
not outright enrage, everyone who invested nearly fives hours of their lives in
the Lazarus kin.
Frankly,
five out six is not bad, especially for an anthology, but a weak dismount
definitely hurts a thriller like Lazarus. Still, Sam Claflin delivers
some of the best work of his career as poor Laz, whom Coben and Brocklehurst
truly put through an emotional wringer. Each episode he has multiple freakouts,
breakdowns, and existential crises.
Harlan Coben's Mickey Bolitar novels were conceived as a YA spin-off to his
popular Myron Bolitar adult novels, but you wouldn’t know it from the streaming
adaptation. The bestselling Myron is Mickey’s uncle in the books, but he is
nowhere to be found in the series. Now the moody teen has a single aunt, perhaps
to avoid conflicts with Coben’s Netflix deal for his grown=up titles.
Regardless, Mickey still has a troubled mother struggling with mental health
issues and his father is still dead, or is he? That will be one of the mysterious
questions preoccupying the Myron-less Bolitar in the eight-episode Harlan
Coben’s Shelter, adapted by the name-in-the-title Harlan & Charlotte
Coben, which premieres today on Prime.
Coben
writes thrillers, but the old dark house seen in Shelter’s trailers looks
rather spooky. It also starts with the two of the most terrifying words
you can see together: “New” and “Jersey.” When he was a kid, Mickey Bolitar’s father
Bradley was double-dog dared to sneak into the supposedly haunted mansion where
the neighborhood weirdo “Bat Lady” lives. According to Aunt Shira, he was never
the same afterwards. After his first eventful day of school, Mickey is also
drawn to Bat Lady’s house, where she tells him his father is not really dead.
Of
course, Bolitar would like to believe her, but he saw his father die before his
eyes. Yet, the more he recalls the tragic accident, the more some strange
little details stand out in his mind. The day started great, when he thought he
was developing chemistry with the cute new girl in school, newbie to newbie,
but then she ghosted him. The next day, he finds she has mysteriously withdrawn
from school. He is suspicious and soon his new friends, geeky Arthur “Spoon”
Spindell and gothy Ema Winslow, agree something sinister is afoot, presumably
involving Bat Lady, a mysterious man with an octopus facial tattoo, and the
still unsolved disappearance of Bradley Bolitar’s little league friend.
The
tone of Shelter is pretty dark, but you can still see the young adult
roots. In fact, the best thing going for the series is chemistry shared by
Bolitar, Spindell, Winslow, and Rachell Caldwell, the captain of the cheer
squad, who joins their Scooby Drew Crew halfway through. It is consistently entertaining
watching them snoop and investigate, even though we could do without so much
attention to Caldwell’s straight frustrations with her dumb jock boyfriend and
Winslow’s lesbian interest in the school’s leading online influencer.
Jaden
Michael is believably angsty as Bolitar, but never to an obnoxiously overbearing
degree. The wacky character of Spindell
is a lot, but Adrian Greensmith keeps him kind of somewhat grounded, which is something.
Abby Corrgian manages to convey Winslow’s sensitivity and intuition without
making the character a complete wallflower. Howerver, the real discovery is
Sage Linder, who outshines everyone as the gutsy, gun-toting Caldwell.
Constance
Zimmer has a tough job, since she plays Shira Bolitar, replacing Myron, who was
the commercial hook the source novel was surely originally sold with. However,
she provides a nicely down-to-earth easy-to-identify-with adult influence om
the series.
