Horror month — otherwise known as October — this year brought multiple fictionalized series about real serial killers, with actors playing John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein and various men suspected of being the Monster of Florence. But as the end of the month approaches, dramatic tricks make way for traditional Halloween treats: Harlan Coben, Anne Rice and Stephen King. Apparently, having a combined 650 million books in print still means something.
‘Harlan Coben’s Lazarus’
Coben is primarily known as a writer of earthly mystery thrillers (like “Tell No One” and “Fool Me Once”). This British production on Amazon Prime Video, which he created straight for streaming with Danny Brocklehurst, lives up to the supernatural implications of its title: The main character, a prison psychiatrist nicknamed Laz, sees dead people. Or maybe he imagines seeing them. He doesn’t appear to be dead himself, though there are times during Sam Claflin’s clenched-jaw performance as Laz when you might begin to wonder.
“Lazarus” is still a mystery at heart, though, with the ghostly visitations serving to provide clues (in the arbitrary, just-on-time manner of so many contemporary whodunits) and to complicate life for Laz, who can’t tell anyone where he is getting his information. It has some of the structure of a classic locked-room mystery, the room being the darkly flashy penthouse and office where his father, also a psychiatrist, dies early in the show. It also has some of the chic unease of a ’90s-era psychological thriller, without the sex; the spirits of Alan Parker and Roman Polanski hover beneath the penthouse’s lofty ceilings.
Laz is bedeviled by the deaths of both his father and his twin sister, who was killed in the apartment years before. The mystery is murky and complicated; having a character declare in the sixth and final episode, “I still don’t understand any of this; it makes no sense at all,” is rash. But the story is just as concerned with the wages of guilt and duplicity as it is with detection. (In this it has a more than passing resemblance to “Tell No One.”) Those themes are presented most forcefully in dialogues between Laz and his dad, who is played — and here is the reason, if for only five minutes an episode, to watch the show — by the wonderful, witty Bill Nighy, who embodies the parent you simultaneously adore and dread. (Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.)
‘Anne Rice’s Talamasca: The Secret Order’
“Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches,” the previous series in AMC’s Riceverse — known officially as the Immortal Universe — was not exactly a good show, but it had a juicy, rococo weirdness that made its first season fun to watch, at least until it went full Wicker Man. (For some viewers, that was probably when the fun started.)
This new series, related but free-standing, has a full measure of gore and the scary creatures who generate it — vampires, witches, werewolves and others — but it is less about the weird than the workaday. Focusing on the Talamasca, the hidden organization that operates as a peacekeeping force among supernatural factions, it’s as close to a procedural mystery as a show based on Rice’s novels is likely to get.
The show’s creator, the filmmaker John Lee Hancock (“The Rookie,” “Saving Mr. Banks”), has cited John le Carré’s depictions of amoral spy bureaucracies as an inspiration for “Talamasca: The Secret Order.” (A character is named Leamas, after the star-crossed agent in “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” Another lives at the Dakota, presumably in homage to “Rosemary’s Baby.”)
That’s an awfully high bar to set for yourself, one that “Talamasca” does not come close to crossing. But on its own terms — as a good-looking, generic, B+ thriller with a slight sense of humor that doesn’t egregiously insult your intelligence — it succeeds reasonably well. Nicholas Denton (Valmont in Starz’s “Dangerous Liaisons”) is capable and sympathetic, if a bit bland, as the young clairvoyant co-opted by the Talamasca; not bland at all are Elizabeth McGovern as his handler and William Fichtner as the vampire he’s investigating. (Premieres Sunday on AMC and AMC+.)
‘It: Welcome to Derry’
King’s name is not in the title of this latest spinoff from his 1986 novel, “It.” It would have helped — the novel and its previous film and television adaptations might be pop-cultural touchstones, but when I first saw this title, I thought the raucous young women of “Derry Girls” had all taken jobs at a Northern Ireland tech firm.
Instead we’re back in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, on the timeline of the first film adaptation, “It,” which was directed by Andy Muschietti; he is one of the creators of this prequel series, along with his sister, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs. The main action is set in 1962, and if you know your “It,” you know that the murderous entity that haunts Derry on a cicada-like rhythm is due for an appearance.
King’s novel, with its team of youngsters battling inconceivably powerful monsters, was an acknowledged influence on the Netflix series “Stranger Things.” The influence comes full circle in “Welcome to Derry,” whose combination of nostalgic Middle Americana with a snarky, contemporary gloss on old comic-book formulas now feels reminiscent of the Netflix hit. “Derry” has an advantage in its early-60s time period, though: Its attack on Cold War conformity and suspicion is more lively and entertaining than anything “Stranger Things” has had to say about 1980s consumerism.
Jovan Adepo (who appeared in a previous King series, “The Stand”) and Taylour Paige lead a large and generally fine cast as an Air Force officer newly assigned to a base outside Derry and his activist wife. Chris Chalk of “Perry Mason” stands out as a fellow officer with a secret, and many good, not-well-known young actors play the various groups of children who are set upon, sometimes in distressing fashion, by the big bad. The casting of Bill Skarsgard, who played Pennywise the clown in the films, is a giveaway that Pennywise will be one of evil’s faces in the series; in the five (of eight) episodes available for review, his presence was strictly rationed. (Premieres Sunday on HBO and HBO Max.)
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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