In the past decade, Harlan Coben has been adapted to television 19 times. With Lazarus (or Harlan Coben’s Lazarus as Prime Video stylizes it), he, along with Daniel Brocklehurst, has created his first original to TV offering. With a surprisingly solid record in his other crime dramas, it makes a certain amount of sense. Alas, this one trails behind the shows adapted from his work.

When his father, psychiatrist Jonathan Lazarus (Bill Nighy), is found dead in his office by apparent suicide, Joel (Sam Claflin) must return home. A psychiatrist himself, Joel found the profession more because of the murder of his twin sister, Sutton (Eloise Little), when both were 18, than anything Jonathan ever did. Back in town, Joel reconnects with his younger (?) sister Jenna (Alexandra Roach), his friend police officer Seth McGovern (David Fynn), and his ex-wife Bella (Karla Crome).

As the grief and forced walk down Nostalgia Boulevard isn’t disorienting enough, Joel soon finds himself visited by specters of his father’s clients. It isn’t til Joel comes face to face with his father’s phantasm to announce that, besides being his clients, all the ghosts have another thing in common, himself included. They were all murdered. Joel immediately takes this information and pursues a theory of the case that argues his dad didn’t die by suicide, ALL the murders are connected, and that includes his twin’s from years earlier.

Lazarus does more than just feel a little too long, a near staple of streaming TV these days. Instead, it feels as though when Prime Video gave Coben six episodes, he said, “Great”. Then he sat down and realized he only had around four episodes of plot. As a result, there is a quality of adding complication, not complexity, and repeating plot beats to fill the space. And then it finishes it off with an ending/cliffhanger that this writer hated, to put it mildly.

Claflin is good as the aggrieved and increasingly unnerved son, forced to return after years trying to put home in the rearview. However, the show betrays his efforts by increasingly giving him the same notes to hit over and over. At a certain point, there’s simply no further escalation of intensity one can manage. So he settles on using increasingly louder and longer durations of screaming. It’s a shame because when the time comes to settle it all down and play pain and regret, Claflin finds the groove again. It’s just the scripts ask that of him far too rarely.

Nighy is fittingly vague and flinty as the Jonathan of both memory and supernatural apparition. Joel’s daddy issues feel honestly come by, but not the result of a just straight-up “bad dad, therapist dad” thanks to Nighy’s performance. He refuses to let his character off the hook for his mistakes, but won’t cast them as monstrous either. The rest of the cast does fine with fairly limited material. The one exception is Jack Deam as Arlo Jones, a serial killer both father and son treated. He wants to go big, but Lazarus doesn’t have the space for it. Thus, he feels like a vestigial organ of some less hushed, more aggressive alternate universe version.

Speaking of hushed, the show is quite restrained when not asking its lead to bellow at shadows and weird neighbors. Officially billed as a horror-thriller, there’s never anything especially scary about the show. It also doesn’t rely on gore to earn the genre tag, save for one moment of a head meeting a bus tire. It really only applies if you consider anything with ghosts to be inherently horror. Instead, it has an almost cozy mystery vibe with cozy yellow lighting and a kind of early evening fall shadows descending on most scenes. Jonathan’s office in particular is a beautiful set with warm woods, open spaces, spiral staircases, and well-arranged bookshelves. If nothing else, Lazarus’s production, art, and set teams have done their jobs exceptionally well.

Unfortunately, again, they’re doing so for a show that runs out of things to say about two-thirds into he season. Then it can only think of getting more implausible from there. The repetition of arguments, declarations, and surprise twists does no one any favors. As a once huge devotee of the twist, my kingdom for a mystery that is interesting and well-told, but not seeking to shock or outsmart me.

Spoiler norms forbid me from discussing the end in any detail. So, to be as vague as possible, it is an ugly postscript that takes what could’ve been an understandable bittersweet note and drowns it in blood. The psychological concept it is playing with is pop at its dumbest. Making it a cliffhanger only adds to my disgust with it. It doesn’t add anything intriguing to the episodes that preceded it or serve as an exciting tease for what comes next. It isn’t even shocking. Once the music swells, but there is still time left in the episode, you can guess what comes next.

Without the end, Lazarus is mediocre but not without its appeals. With the ending? A right waste of time.

Lazarus starts seeing dead people around the hall of Prime Video starting October 22.

Lazarus Trailer: