The Lazarus Project, Sky Max review — mass extinction made worse by mass exposition

Sorry to have to break it to you, but it turns out the cold war wasn’t so cold after all and the world ended in 1963. The good news is that there’s a clandestine organisation who’ve handily harnessed the ability to pop back in time and avert such “mass extinction events” (there have been several).

Sky Max’s uneven new sci-fi thriller series The Lazarus Project follows the titular group (who sound more like a middling electronica band than a team of secret agents) in their latest attempt to save us all from annihilation.

We begin with an all-too-familiar catastrophe. A new and lethal virus sweeps across the planet; the death toll rises and hospitals overflow. For app developer George (Paapa Essiedu) everything is still going well: he’s received a loan to found a company, got married and his wife is expecting a child. That is until he is inexplicably snapped back to six months earlier. The whiplash is severe and George’s life falls apart as he tries to prove that he’s lived through it all before.

His search for answers eventually leads him to Lazarus, which had rewound time in the hope of sourcing a vaccine (we owe the Covid-19 one to them too, apparently). While all their carefully selected operatives have been given an artificial injection to help them retain memories of time loops, George, it transpires, has developed a natural “mutation”, giving him the same gift — or perhaps curse.

After a lot of ungainly (albeit necessary) expository spiels about the rules that underpin Lazarus and how the “resets” work, George is convinced by senior member Archie (a splinteringly wooden Anjli Mohindra) to join its ranks and dive straight into the next mission: pursuing a nuclear-weapon-wielding former agent called Rebrov (Tom Burke) who’s gone rogue. Although global disaster is narrowly avoided, a personal tragedy strikes George, leaving him to contemplate risking the world for one individual.

The opening episode can feel offputtingly clunky and déjà vu-inducing — and not just because it’s the third big TV series in two months to deal with time travel. In subsequent episodes, thankfully, the eight-parter becomes more intriguing. The table-setting gives way to an exploration of the implications of playing god, but writer Joe Barton (Giri/Haji) makes his characters overly articulate, keen to dissect every practical, metaphysical and ethical quandary. Too often The Lazarus Project spells things out rather than trusting the viewer to get there on their own.

★★★☆☆

On Sky Max and Now from June 16 at 9pm; new episodes air weekly