Currently watching: The Lazarus Project (minor spoilers for episode 1)

I hadn’t heard of this show but the Hugo Book Club Twitter account suggested it. Made by UK’s Sky Television, it’s available in Australia on the streaming service Stan. Stan’s a bit of an also-ran in the streaming stakes. It started as an early competitor to Netflix but with the rise of other services, it ends up as the service that has shows that don’t have anywhere specific to live. I picked up a subscription to watch Poker Face and it also has Batman: The Animated Series, so keeping a subscription for a little while longer.

The simplest way to sum up The Lazarus Project is Groundhog Day meets Spooks. It’s a time loop show but with the addition of a secret intelligence agency that has a great big reset button. The main character is an ordinary guy who has a latent ability to remember when time has been reset. In the first episode, he finds himself reliving six months of his life that start off personally very succesful but which descend rapidly when the world is engulfed in a second pandemic which proves more dealy than COVID.

The science fiction premise is that somewhere near Earth’s orbit around the Sun is a singularity that creates a potential reset point once a year on July 1. The Lazarus Project is an agency that has control over this potential reset, essentially a giant save point for the video game of human history. However, they constrain themselves to only resetting back a year in the event of truly apocalyptic events. The bad news is that our potential to all die horribly in a nuclear war or a mass pandemic is far greater than our experience suggests.

It is a neat premise, that allows for a view of “changing the past” that makes narrative sense while not being the solution to every possible problem.

I’m just two episodes in but I’m curious to see where this goes.