The boom of high-concept serialized genre series that followed the success of Lost in the mid-'00s has mostly faded, but every so often networks still launch a series that feels like it could have debuted somewhere in Lost's third season. The recent popularity of Manifest proved that there's still an audience for these types of mystery-box shows. Directly on the heels of giving up Manifest to Netflix, NBC premieres another Lost-style genre series, La Brea. It's tough to tell after just one episode what kind of long-running mythology La Brea might develop, but there's very little in the premiere that suggests it's a world worth watching.
One character explicitly speculates about being trapped in an episode of Lost, but La Brea draws as much from Saturday-morning classic Land of the Lost and short-lived Fox series Terra Nova as it does from Lost. The concept of the lost prehistoric world goes back to Marvel's Savage Land and even further to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, which was adapted into one of the first epic adventure feature films in 1925. La Brea isn't a particularly imaginative take on the concept, and its modern CGI effects look worse than the pioneering stop motion of The Lost World.
La Brea's story is split between modern L.A. and the mysterious prehistoric realm. A group of humans is transported to the realm after a giant sinkhole opens up in the middle of L.A., near the famed La Brea Tar Pits -- an exhibit of preserved prehistoric animals that gives the series its title and hints at the connections between the two worlds. Right before the ground starts to collapse, Eve Harris (Natalie Zea) is stuck in traffic, driving her teenage kids Josh (Jack Martin) and Izzy (Zyra Gorecki) to school. Soon they find themselves in the middle of what looks like a Roland Emmerich movie, as panicked people run from danger, with a massive abyss opening just behind them.
Izzy makes it to safety, but Josh and Eve both fall down the hole after Eve pointlessly sacrifices herself to save her daughter -- who's on solid ground and in no need of saving. Instead of dying horrible deaths, though, Eve, Josh, and dozens of others fall through a strange glowing portal, waking up in an unfamiliar wilderness, entirely unharmed. They're surrounded by cars and other detritus of the city street, and like the plane-crash survivors on Lost, they take stock of their resources, warily join forces with each other, and try to get their bearings.
Eve and Josh bond most closely with the ridiculously commanding Samuel Valez (Jon Seda), a former Navy SEAL who's also a doctor, and his teenage daughter Riley (Veronica St. Clair). There's also a cop who's already reluctant to share food, a stoner who's amused by the absurdity of the whole situation, and a therapist on the verge of suicide. No doubt they all have their secrets, which will be parceled out over the course of the season. For now, none of them feel particularly interesting. However, Zea projects a mix of toughness and honesty that gives Eve more depth than creator David Appelbaum's exposition-heavy dialogue provides.
While Eve, Josh, and their fellow castaways are exploring their new surroundings, Izzy reunites with her estranged father Gavin (Eoin Mackin), a former military pilot with a drinking problem. Gavin has been having unexplained visions that he previously attributed to a head injury, but now he starts seeing flashes of Eve and Josh, and he somehow knows that he's tapped into the pre-historic world. The generic government officials running the investigation into the disaster don't have any interest in talking to Gavin and their dialogue comes off more like parodies to investigators in criminal thrillers.
The revelations about where the people who fell through the portal have ended up are all silly, and it doesn't help that the show presents them with such solemnity. There's a genuine sense of danger to some of what Eve and Josh face, but the suspense is undermined by the shockingly shoddy special effects, which add to the sense that La Brea could have been weekend-afternoon syndication in the '90s. The overgrown wolves and the saber-toothed tiger that menace the castaways look like something out of an Asylum production.
It's not uncommon for high-concept television sci-fi series to suffer shaky starts. So maybe future episodes of La Brea will throw in some plot twists or new characters to give more depth or make its tone less laughable. Most of the Lost clones from the past decade never got the chance to find that footing, though, and it seems likely that La Brea won't either.
La Brea airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT starting Sept. 28 on NBC.