The Lazarus Project, Season Two, on TNT

Sure, you could call George Addo a mass murderer, but seriously, it depends on the context. Granted, he shot a bunch of people and deliberately caused a nuclear war that exterminated all life on the planet, but he knew his boss at the Lazarus Project would turn back time to the nearest reset point to undo it all. Even though Addo admits to a few lapses in judgement, it is hard for his old colleagues to trust him again. Unfortunately, things will get so bad, they will need him anyway in season two of creator-writer Joe Barton’s The Lazarus Project, which premieres tomorrow on TNT.

The Lazarus agents are not time-travelers. They just consciously relive certain periods of time until they figure out how to save the world. Actual time-travel is something their boss Elisabeth “Wes” Wesley wanted to prevent. Unfortunately, the renegade Time-Break Initiative managed to build a working time machine, completing the work of Dr. Kitty Gray, who died in a mysterious laboratory fire back in the 2010s. They just didn’t quite get it right.

Consequently, they opened-up a black hole that is literally fraying the fabric of time. Unless they can fix the problem, the Lazarus Project will be stuck in a decaying time-loop, until time ends for good. Rather awkwardly, Addo must repeatedly face Shiv Reddy immediately after having shot him. He keeps saving his life, with the help of his EMT neighbor, whom Addo must then kill over and over again.

Obviously, Addo cannot blame Reddy for being annoyed with him. What hurts is getting dumped by his wife (or girlfriend, depending on the reset) Sarah dumping him, after he literally blew-up the world to save her. To explain himself, Addo gives her the time-reset-awareness drug, but that rather leaves her feelings towards him even more confused. Regardless, they need to find someone who understands time-travel, but someone is killing all of Dr. Gray’s old colleagues.

Arguably, Lazarus Project is the best-written new science fiction currently releasing new episodes, but hardly anyone in the U.S. seems to be talking about it. In the first season, Barton regularly used the resets to completely upend the narrative. For season two, he ups the ante with legit time-travel, but the frequent time resets still apply. It almost gets farcical as future characters keep re-encountering their past selves, or vice versa, but the [barely] controlled chaos is a blast. Frankly, every darned thing Barton keeps springing on viewers is exactly the stuff sf fans love, so why is there so little buzz for the series?

Paapa Essiedu is just as good playing Addo in season two as he was in the first season, or maybe even better. It is hard to think of a series protagonist who messes so badly and so often, yet we still root for him. He also faces a really dark, existential challenge this time around. Similarly, Rudi Dharmalingam is the heart and soul of season two, getting shot in the chest at the start of most episodes and getting steadily crankier as each reset plays out.

The Lazarus Project, on TNT

It is sort of like Groundhog Day all over again, but George Addo’s new colleagues are doing it deliberately, at least until they get things right. That is their job at the super-secret agency known as Lazarus. Whenever the civilized world faces an extinction level event, they rewind time back to the last July 1^st, so they can fix things. That causes a lot of confusion for Addo when he starts to remember what was rewound in creator-writer Joe Barton’s The Lazarus Project, which premieres tomorrow night on TNT.

At first, Addo was just a modestly hip British app developer on the brink of big-time financial success. He married his girlfriend Sarah Leigh, but as they settled down to live happily ever after, a virulent plague started killing everyone on the planet. Then Addo woke up and it was July 1^st, as if the last six months never happened.

Of course, Addo tries to warn the world of what is coming, but everyone assumes he is crazy—except the mysterious Archie. She tells him where to meet her if he remembers the next time it happens, which indeed it does. It turns out most Lazarus agents need to be dosed with their memory drug before they can recall past time resets. However, Addo is one of the few “mutants” that have developed the talent on their own. His new moody colleague Shiv Reddy is another.

Fortunately, Lazarus developed a sufficient vaccine for Covid-20, or whatever it was. (Anyone who was suspicious about how quickly the last Covid vaccine was developed—here’s your answer.) The bad news is a particularly massive nuclear bomb nicknamed “Big Boy” has been stolen. The worse news is the apparent involvement of Dennis Rebrov, a former Lazarus agent who turned against the agency. He is now determined to see the world burn, which sounds inexplicably nihilistic, but he has his reasons.

In fact, many of the character-establishing flashbacks are among the best scenes in Lazarus Project. Barton (whose screenwriting credits include Ritual and Encounter) has a knack for character-driven sf. He largely punts when it comes to credible scientific explanations, but so be it. He more than compensates for a lack of Doctor Who-worthy doublespeak with his one-darned-thing-after-another plot twists. Plus, he and the producers deserve credit for an additional, complicating villain they reveal in episode seven. Here’s a hint: they are committing genocide in Xinjiang.

Barton and series directors Marco Kreuzpaintner (episodes one to four), Laura Scrivano (five and six), and Akaash Meeda (seven and eight) keep viewers hooked, while radically shifting our responses to Addo. He is clearly the protagonist, but the demarcation between heroes and villains in Lazarus Project is a subtle and shifting line.

Snowpiercer, the TV Show

It is sort of like a dystopian Jules Verne yarn, wherein the last dregs of humanity survive the apocalypse in a train perpetually circling the earth, managed by Wilford Industries. The corporation has saved humanity, but of course they are the bad guys. That was conspicuously and gratingly so in Bong Joon-ho’s criminally over-rated film. However, there is a lot more nuance and dramatically richer characterization in the first fresh-start, blank-slate season of the TV adaption of Snowpiercer, which premieres this Sunday on TNT.

Global warming panic lead scientists to develop a planetary cooling scheme that worked too well. Now the planet is an ice ball and most life is dead. Fortunately, Wilford Industries produced Snowpiercer, a train one thousand and one cars long that must remain in constant motion to beat the freeze. Melanie Cavill is the public face of the Wilford company. It is her soothing voice that makes the PA announcements, but she also serves as Mr. Wilford’s direct lieutenant when it comes to maintaining order.

Andre Layton is the leader of the opposition. As a “Tailie,” he was not even supposed to be on Snowpiercer, but he and his fellow proles forced their way into the tail-section before the train left Chicago. Now they live off scraps and resentment, which often ignites battles with the “Brakemen,” Snowpiercer’s axe-wielding cops (guns pose a risk of rupturing the train’s environmental seals). Layton is definitely a fist-raising revolutionary, but he was also a homicide detective during his previous life, so Cavill is forced to send for him when a murder is committed up train. Of course, his investigation will uncover more of the train’s dirty secrets than Cavill imagined.

The Snowpiercer series is drastically different from the movie—and each and every change is for the better. Showrunner Graeme Manson deserves a great deal of credit for ditching the crude caricatures and in-your-face class warfare didacticism that made the film so abrasive. This time around, there really are two sides to the story, order versus equality. That in turn gives rise to real drama.

At the center of it all is Cavill, who is an endlessly intriguing and ultimately acutely human character. Thanks to Jennifer Connelly’s extraordinary portrayal, we come to understand the compromises she made and how each agonizing choice inevitably leads to another. Honestly, this could be the best genre television performance of the year.

Daveed Diggs also covers a lot of emotional terrain, humanizing Layton far beyond a stick-figure proletarian rebel. He is at his best fencing with either Connelly’s Cavill or Sheila Vand as Layton’s former fiancé, Zarah Ferami, who betrayed her class by accepting a new life working in a third-class nightclub. Like Cavill, Ferami is a complicated character, who must live with the consequences of her decisions every day.

The Alienist: Caleb Carr’s Novel Comes to TNT

The state of psychological treatment was pretty grim around the late Nineteenth Century, but fortunately you were much more likely to die from disease, malnutrition, or industrial accidents before depression or schizophrenia could really run their course. Murder was also a possibility. Dr. Laszlo Kreizler is a progressive head-shrinker and a pioneering criminologist loosely attached to the NYPD. Even the reformist commissioner, Teddy Roosevelt is skeptical of his methods, but he will empower his investigation of a suspected serial killer anyway in TNT’s limited series adaptation of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (trailer here), which premieres tomorrow night.

Kreizler is an odd fellow, but he still has a knack for convincing newspaper illustrator John Moore to do his bidding. Moore will be less than thrilled when Kreizler sends him out to sketch the grisly crime scene where a murdered boy prostitute was found, but he does it anyway. Kreizler is convinced the killer has struck before, but the uniformed officers are either paid to look the other way or too callous to care.

They both have shared history with TR, but that will only get them so far. Moore also had some prior dealings with Roosevelt’s stereotype-challenging assistant Sara Howard, but that was all quite unfortunate. Nevertheless, the three will become the brain-trust of a semi-official task force, rounded out by Sergeants Marcus and Lucius Isaacson, who are not well-liked on the force, due to their modern investigative techniques (as well as the fact they are Jewish). Howard will report their findings directly to Roosevelt, because Captain Connor is transparently corrupt and quite possibly complicit in the murders, at least to some extent.

Based on the first two episodes, will feel confident saying The Alienist is a prime example of the importance of casting. As Connor, David Wilmot is already a bad guy we love to hate and the great Ted Levine promises even greater scenery-chewing villainy as his predecessor, Thomas Byrnes. The three primary leads, Daniel Brühl, Dakota Fanning, and Luke Evans are also bang-on target.

In fact, Kreizler could very well be the breakout role Brühl has struggled to find after Inglorious Basterds led to predictions he would be the next big thing. He really has the right blend of twitchiness and arrogance. Evans keeps his jaw squared as Moore, while Fanning is strong but sensitive as Howard. Only Brian Geraghty seems off-the-mark, coming across rather passive and milquetoast as TR (who was nobody’s shrinking violet).

The Alienist is a richly detailed period production (executive produced by Cary Fukunaga, with John Sayles on board as a “consulting producer”), but after two installments, Hossein Amini’s adaptation still feels somewhat weighted down with exposition. Presumably, helmer Jakob Verbruggen will quicken the pace for the subsequent six episodes. It certainly shows promise and fans of the original novel should appreciate its faithfulness. Recommended (so far) for viewers of BBC America shows, like Copper and Ripper Street, The Alienist begins tomorrow night (1/22) on TNT.

The Librarians: The Television Film Franchise Goes Weekly

Flynn Carsen is a librarian Kramer would approve of. He does not spend a lot of time putting newspapers on big wooden sticks for cheapskates trying to save a quarter and probably doesn’t even know the Dewey Decimal System. Instead, he spends his time tracking down magical items to keep them out of the hands of potential evil-doers. The protagonist of TNT’s hit television movie franchise The Librarian is now a recurring character in their new regular series, The Librarians, note the plural form, which debuts with back-to-back episodes (The Librarians and the Crown of King Arthur and The Librarians and the Sword and the Stone) this Sunday (promo here).

Carsen has two last names and twenty-two college degrees. The perennial student was chosen by “the Library,” the mystical apostolic successor to the great Library in Alexandria, now hidden beneath the Metropolitan Public Library in New York. Having held his own in a series of adventures, Carsen is rather put out when the Library recruits Col. Eve Baird, a no-nonsense counter-terrorism operative to be his Protector. However, he will reluctantly accept her help when the shadowy Serpent Brotherhood starts assassinating all the weird genius rivals he beat out for his current globe-trotting gig. In fact, the only former candidates still surviving are the three oddballs who never made it in for their interviews.

Jacob Stone is an unassuming laborer in the Oklahoma oil fields, who writes scholarly articles on medieval art and history under an assumed name. Ezekiel Jones is a thrill-seeker, who likes to steal the things Stone writes about. Cassandra Cillian has savant-like powers of memory and superhuman computation, but it might be linked to the tumor that will eventually kill her. Together with Carsen and Baird, they will track down several Arthurian relics the Brotherhood needs to control the magic they intend to let loose upon the world.

The Librarian one-offs might have been popular, but they must have skewed toward a decidedly younger demographic. While the premiere episodes, directed in a straight forward manner by Independence Day producer Dean Devlin, never descend into outright slapstick, the dominant acting style practiced is decidedly broad. This is especially so for Noah Wyle’s Carsen and hammy John Larroquette, joining the Librarian world as Jenkins, the curmudgeonly manager of the Library’s branch office (evidently in Portland of all places), who is clearly being set up to serve as the Giles-Watcher to the three new recruits. However, Rebecca Romijn demonstrates decent action chops and an appealingly down-to-business screen presence as Baird.

The villains are not bad either. Matt Frewer returns to chew a bit of scenery as the Brotherhood’s immortal overlord, Dulaque and Lesley-Ann Brandt’s unfortunately named Lamia is a promising femme fatale. It is hard to judge from just two episodes, but John Kim and Christian Kane at least seem comfortable in the parts of Jones and Stone. In contrast, Lindy Booth may need some time to figure out how to breathe life into Cillian, a passive naïf character written somewhere between a door mouse and door mat.

Guys of my generation probably would have loved this show when we were twelve years old. There is magic and adventure, but it feels old fashioned in a 1980s network television kind of way. To an extent, it is like the Friday the 13^th series, with fantasy trappings instead of the supernatural horror (it also lacks the evil antiquing show’s distinctive vibe). It is harmless and might serve as a productive stepping stone for Romijn, but it will underwhelm most adult genre audiences. For franchise fans, the first two episodes of The Librarians debut on TNT this Sunday (12/7).