I've been defending Adult Swim for a long time. And contrary to whatever your first reaction to that sentence or this entire review is, I'm still going to. But I am not the same Adult Swim fan that I was in 2018. Simply because, well, Adult Swim isn't the same as it was in 2018. Toonami certainly isn't. Even with cable ratings declining by truckloads, Adult Swim remained the only cable network that still gave a damn. That ended up becoming a double edged sword, evidenced in 2023 when it overtook Cartoon Network for number of hours on the air. Cartoon Network is in an even worse shape but I'm getting off-topic. My point is that I'm not watching Adult Swim like I used to. I didn't watch Lazarus on Adult Swim, I watched it on HBO Max. My interest in watching anime on Toonami is fading. Toonami is a gateway drug but I took that drug a decade ago. Honestly, the only reason I even watched Lazarus was because my friend really wanted to. If I was on my own, I probably wouldn't have gotten around to it.

I've seen every Adult Swim original anime except for Blade Runner: Black Lotus (or the Rick and Morty one if that counts). Lazarus isn't the best of these shows, nor is it the worst. If I were to rank them, Lazarus would be in the middle. But I'm not going to rank them because I don't think that's the problem. When I finished Lazarus, I wasn't thinking "Wow this was easily one of the weaker Shinichiro Watanabe shows", I'm thinking "I am sick of these Adult Swim original anime all feeling like the same damn show". I can't explain it but a Shinichiro Watanabe series should not have the same art direction as Ninja Kamui and Shenmue. Is it a Sola Entertainment thing? I hope not but I'm inclined to believe so.

Let's actually talk about Lazarus on the off chance anyone reading this doesn't know or care about Adult Swim. The plot of Lazarus is simple: in the near future, a Turkish scientist named Dr. Skinner releases a painkiller called "Hapna" which I think is how you spell it. Hapna is a perfect pain reliever so everyone takes it and everyone is happy and free and clubbing and shit. Three years later, Dr. Skinner comes out of hiding and reveals that Hapna is poisonous and everyone who took it will die 3 years afterwards. Enter Lazarus: a team of five secret agents who have one month to find the elusive Dr. Skinner and beg him to make a cure before the first people who took Hapna will start dying.

The series does not do any dive into how Hapna worked and why everyone took it. That I'll let slide because let's face it all that matters is that "everyone starts dying in 30 days unless we find this guy", Hapna only exists to answer why or how everyone dies. Here's my problem: very early on I became convinced that the plot twist was going to be that Dr. Skinner was lying about Hapna being a ticking time bomb. I'm not spoiling whether or not that's true because by the end I didn't know which would be better. Either it's real and he makes the cure and everything goes back to normal, or it's not real and it was a giant waste of the planet's time.

Alright so the premise is flawed, so what? The show is actually a globe-trotting adventure of five secret agents, who cares why they're on their adventure? Okay then let's look at our five main characters. There's Axel, the cocky and brash lead who always gets in trouble but he's smooth and likable and that's all I got. No really that's all I got on all five. Without looking them up I don't even remember the names of the other four. I remember that Eleina is a hacker even if I had to copy/paste her name from Wikipedia. I do not remember what the other three did that made them unique. I can't tell you anything that you couldn't figure out by clicking on the characters and reading their descriptions. I don't care for Samurai Champloo, on a level similar to Lazarus actually, but Mugen was the arrogant loud mouth that acted before he thought. Jin was the calm and collected type that handled situations in a more stoic manner. And Fuu was the cute girl in search of the fabled Sunflower Samurai. I might be a little off on some of these, and they probably deserve better descriptions, but these are iconic characters because they're fun. You can put them in any situation and they would be fun. The characters in Lazarus at best have been done before. Axel is just Spike and Mugen again.

With boring characters and an uninteresting premise (along with a plot that believe me goes nowhere), you can't blame anything else but the writing, something that admittedly we all probably should've seen coming from a hundred miles away. Cowboy Bebop by all accounts has strong writing but it's also got arguably the greatest main cast of characters in an original anime so comparing anything except I dunno Evangelion to it is a fool's errand. Samurai Champloo's writing is fine but that show is all about the mood. The direction and music are Samurai Champloo. Space Dandy doesn't give a shit about its story and it's all the better for it. At the time of this writing I haven't seen Kids on the Slope (but that's a manga adaptation) or Carole & Tuesday yet, and hey maybe Carole & Tuesday is awful but I'm not judging until I see it for myself. So the show that I think makes for the best comparison to Lazarus is Terror in Resonance, a flawed series that I love (that hey is also animated by MAPPA). That show is about two teenagers committing terrorist attacks while the police scramble to uncover both why and how to stop them. Its premise has similar problems to Lazarus, its writing is also all over the place, but it grabs your attention. When action is happening, you're watching. And that's because of a difference in genre. Terror in Resonance is a psychological thriller focused on its mystery. That's what it wants you to care about. Lazarus wants you to care about its action.

Terror in Resonance is also a good comparison because I'm already seeing people say that Lazarus's problem is being 13 episodes. "If it was longer then the characters could get fleshed out more." I don't buy it. Because Lazarus does try to make you care for its characters. But it's all done to service the plot and nothing more. Lazarus doesn't need 26 episodes, it needs 13 episodes that are focused on getting us to care about its characters. Leland is the only character that I recognize this almost working in, but it's a wasted effort considering I didn't even remember his name before looking it up.

It's sad because once you look past the fatal flaw of Lazarus's writing, the rest of the show is good. The direction is solid, the action choreography was worth getting Chad Stahelski. The episodes written by Dai Sato were fun. And of course, as a Watanabe show, the music is great. But it's hard to appreciate the direction when the writing is this much of a snoozefest. The best analogy I can make towards Lazarus is its opening, Vortex. The song is great, I have no complaints there, it's arguably the best damn thing about the show. But the visuals boil down to "birds flying, all five characters are falling like they're in the Mad Men intro making the same expression, they do some kicks, and then the opening ends". It's the shortest 90 seconds of my life. It's an opening that insists so much personality while exuding none.

I'm not gonna lie, writing this review soured my feelings on Lazarus. I originally had like two paragraphs but that was it. The more I forced myself to write about Lazarus, the more I came to terms with how little I was taking away from the experience. Do I recommend Lazarus? Probably not. If you're a seasoned anime veteran, you know what yeah go ahead, it's not every day you get a new Watanabe anime. But remember at the beginning of this way too long review when I said that Toonami was my gateway drug? With Toonami's relevance as curators gone, there's no good resource for people that are interested in anime to find "what's good and worth checking out". It's either too simple or too elitist. I look at this medium and how I don't think the English-speaking world is doing a great job at making sure the classics remain classics for the next generation of English-speaking anime fans, and I can't bring myself to say "Yeah Lazarus was painfully okay but it's worth checking out". Dawg if you're still reading this wondering "Hmm is this for me?" then what are either of us doing? Why talk about Lazarus, a show that went in one ear and out the other, when we can be preserving the truly great shows both old and new? Okay I need to wrap this up, Lazarus is not worth an existential crisis.

Look I have no ill will towards Jason DeMarco. The fact that we're getting original anime at all should be commended. Neither he nor Adult Swim are killing anime just because they're pumping out mediocrity. But either he needs to produce an original anime that doesn't feel like literally every single Toonami original anime we've seen so far or he needs to stop making anime for Toonami.