La Brea

You are going to feel like you are traveling in time all right -- the cheap CGI is going to take you back three or four decades right way!

Worse yet you absolutely will sense you have been transported back to a bygone era: before the golden age of TV, to a time when networks treated their audiences like 80 IQ types who have no problem with the most idiotic of dialogue, and need to be led around by the nose.

What a shame. Premise has lots of potential to be above average series, but is held back by awful acting, writing and laughable CGI.

4/10 at best, based on first two episodes distributed to reviewers.

I found the premise interesting but quit watching after the 3rd episode, falling into the tar pit and going back to 10,000 BC is interesting but not enough for me to watch beyond that. It isn't a very exciting show and sort of plods along.

The show isn't that bad. But it isn't that good either. In a really good show you quickly forget you are seeing actors because the dialog is so well written. In this show the dialog is often laughable and the acting inconsistent. I was mainly curious to see how they explain the falling into what amounts to unexplained time travel backwards but if they did it was after I gave up on it..

For any who may not know this show is named for the actual, factual La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. Tar pits where a large number of ancient fossils have been discovered. So this fictional show bridges off that, and the idea that a sinkhole might open up and people might be transported to an ancient time.

Update February 2024: Tonight is being touted as the final episode when they return home. I am watching it to see how the wrap it up. Frankly I am amazed that it lasted as long as it did. The dialog didn't improve over the years.

Poorly written, horridly acted with painfully low-budget special effects... the Asylum Studios has productions better than this drivel. Even the ScFy Channel has produced better content than this. You can't blame anything this bad on the Pandemic.

Hollywood loves trying new shows with strong female leads but Natalie Zea as the fawningly over-protective helicopter Mom is just disastrous. Her acting is heavy-handed and reminds me of Debrah Farentino from Earth 2. As the lead in this sewer circus, Natalie is just a dragging this show down the drain quicker than Debrah did to E2.

Clearly the addition of Zyra Gorecki as daughter Izzy is a cheap PC attempt to cast an "impaired" actor who's better off behind a still camera. Her acting talents aren't even fit for commercials. Even though she appears to be able to work up tears on command, her facial expressions and execution of dialog don't fit the moment or the waterworks.

Whoever was responsible for casting Eoin Macken as the Dad should be fired immediately. I can't really think of anything positive about his role or his talent in this part. I really kept expecting him to die in one of the early episodes... too bad.

What can you say about Jon Seda as Sam and Nicholas Gonzalez as Levi other than they are simply just embarrassing. Was this a conscious effort by the production to cast such weak talent? Something that seems to be a trend in Hollywood over the last 10-15 years.

Chiké Okonkwo as Ty is the only secondary actor that has any chops and it's too bad he's been relegated to such a minor roll.

I watched 5 episodes of this garbage hoping that the cast would settle in to the roles and the writing and production would find their groove... no such luck. If anything, it's gone downhill. At the beginning I was intrigued by the concept but by the end of the 2nd episode, I no longer cared what happened to any of the characters and actually looked forward to a few of them being killed off... eaten or otherwise graphically dispatched.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the type of brainless garbage that will be renewed for more seasons... but one can only hope otherwise.

Stay away from this mind-numbing drivel... you've been warned.

Let me get this straight. A group of people and vehicles fall into a sinkhole and land in 10,000 BC and the writers think that they need, in the second episode, a story line about heroin being found in the trunk of one of the cars? What a wasted premise!

Not a bad premise but atrocious writing and Sharknado levels of CGI. I tried making a drinking game from this show, every time someone said something ridiculous I took a drink, I was just discharged from the hospital with alcohol poisoning.