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The Lazarus Project is a remarkable British science fiction TV show. It was sadly canceled after two seasons (it ran in 2022 and 2023), and the end of the second season is only semi-conclusive, but it’s well worth watching. Both seasons (a total of 16 episodes) are available on Netflix. I like it a lot, despite some significant flaws.

Some other people must have seen it; it lasted two seasons, so it must have had decent ratings. But I had never heard of it before Mary Anne mentioned it to me, and the few people who I’ve mentioned it to since then have never heard of it, so I suspect it’s not all that widely known.

It’s a time-loop show, but it does things with the idea of time loops that I’ve never seen before. If that’s enough to make you want to watch it, and you don’t want to know anything more about it than that, then you can stop reading here.

But if you don’t mind knowing a little bit about it going into it, I think the most important thing for a lot of people to know ahead of time is that the characters go through a whole lot of trauma. In particular, here are some content warnings (which could be considered spoilers, though I’m trying to be only as specific as needed for clarity of warnings):

• Loss of pregnancies and babies.
• Really extraordinary trauma around giving birth—I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a character put through anything birth-related that’s as traumatic as what happens here. (But that may say more about my lack of experience with birth-trauma fiction than about this show.)
• Sympathetically portrayed characters making decisions that lead to traumatic outcomes.
• Sympathetically portrayed characters using torture to get information.
• Sympathetically portrayed characters doing huge-scale horrific things, mostly with the expectation that those things will get more or less undone later.
• Lots of backstory trauma (shown onscreen in extended flashbacks) for several major characters.

All of which makes it sound like the kind of show that I would neither like nor recommend; but I very much liked it overall, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes time-loop fiction and who can cope with that amount and kind of character trauma.

Among the things I really like about it:

• A time-loop paradigm I’ve never seen before, which is explored in fascinating ways that expand the scope of time-loop stories.
• Multiple compelling characters to care about, most of whom are complicated people with interesting interiority. (In particular, there are backstory episodes for a couple of characters that shed fascinating light on who they are.)
• Multiple characters of color and white women. Out of a dozen more-or-less-main characters, I think only three are white men, and I would say only one of those is a really major character.
• Intermittently funny dialogue.
• Although there’s an annoying lack of queer characters in season 1, there are two queer characters in the main cast in season 2.
• Actions have consequences. There are things that characters do early in season 1, the consequences of which continue to reverberate throughout the rest of the series.
• The creators weren’t afraid to take risks and evolve the show as it went on. I thought for a moment that it was going to be a sort of enemy-of-the-week thing, like Mission: Impossible or something, but it turns out it’s not that kind of show at all. And over the course of the two seasons, the focus shifts and the characters develop, and each time I thought I understood what kind of show it was, things changed.

As I noted above, the show has lots of flaws. For example, it’s the kind of show where it’s trivially easy to carry a gun onto an airplane, or drive a truck carrying an obvious giant bomb across an international European border. And I suspect that the budget was relatively low, which might explain occasional odd choices about what gets shown. And season 2 changes the sfnal focus, and I feel like it doesn’t do as good a job of handling the time shenanigans as season 1 does, and it leaves some major questions unanswered. And I found some of the things that the sympathetically portrayed characters do pretty distressing.

But despite its flaws, it’s now one of my favorite TV shows. Really well done.