A Farewell to La Brea, Network TV's Last Big, Bonkers Swing

In another life, David Appelbaum’s La Brea could have been "the next Lost." Since the beloved ABC drama ended in 2010 (to mixed reviews and continued arguments to this day), networks have been chasing the elusive TV magic that started with the pilot of Lost, but that magic has been tough to pin down. It started as a simple concept — strangers stranded together on a strange island after a plane crash — but evolved into a sci-fi mystery box that dominated TV trends for years to come.

Every adventure show was assumed to be an attempt at creating a new Lost — Terra Nova, Revolution, FlashForward, Alcatraz, The Event, Manifest, The 100. Some, like Manifest and The 100, built fanbases that kept them going for a few years, for better or worse, but most got canceled after just a season or two, leaving any remaining viewers either with a rushed finale or an unanswered cliffhanger. The 2010s were littered with big, broken ideas and unsolved mysteries, to the point where one might wonder why they should start watching a show at all if all that lay ahead was disappointment. Networks, meanwhile, went back to basic, reliable procedurals, for the most part.

The La Brea pilot was, admittedly, not comparable to the Lost pilot. When it debuted on NBC in 2021, La Brea was just as big of a high concept joke as any other adventure show premise: A sinkhole opens up in Los Angeles, swallowing a historic block that includes both the La Brea Tar Pits and the Petersen Auto Museum, and sending everyone and everything on that block back to the year 10,000 BC. Families are separated, new friendships are formed. Old secrets are revealed, new starts are made, all while a deep, dark time-hopping military conspiracy is uncovered across multiple decades. It was never as good as Lost, but those of us who stuck with it from the first episode to the last might argue that that's only because it was never allowed to be.

Lost got 25 episodes in its first season, while La Brea, which aired its series finale on February 13, got 30 episodes total. There wasn't time to slow burn romances or draw out character arcs, or build up questions before answers started coming. Every moment felt rushed, but every reveal was so thrilling and fun that it further illustrated what a bummer it was that there wasn't time to make those reveals even better. It felt like NBC had tossed the show onto the air to get rid of it.

But 10 years ago, La Brea would have been marketed as event television, and it could have been event television. The big, gleeful twist that Gavin Harris (Eoin Macken) grew up in 10,000 BC and time traveled to the 20th century as a kid could have dominated watercooler conversations. The ending explanation, that since the 1960s, Gavin and his family had been part of a secret Black Ops program designed to turn time travel technology into a military weapon could have felt so much more revelatory. Imagine the show having the time to really dig into the implications of a plot like that.

Instead, the end of La Brea seems to also mark the sputtering end of broadcast networks taking big, audacious swings. 2024's network TV landscape is dominated by cops, doctors, lawyers, and cop-adjacent crimefighters. None of them are fighting off giant ground sloths or T-rexes or battling time-traveling sinkholes, or even packing risky mystery boxes they may not get to unpack. The riskiest new broadcast show this past season was NBC's Found, a show about a woman (Shanola Hampton) who finds kidnapped people while keeping her own kidnapper (played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar) as a hostage in her basement.

Even Grey's Anatomy isn't blowing up hospitals anymore, and The CW has been reduced to a home for cozy Canadian imports after years of offering incomprehensible five-show crossovers and whatever the heck was happening on Riverdale. To get any wackier than ABC's (formerly Fox's) 9-1-1, you have to head over to cable and streaming, where most big adventure shows are eight episodes based on a video game. Netflix took Avatar: The Last Airbender, a beloved cartoon dramedy with 20 episodes a season, and made what now appears to be an eight-episode live-action drama. Wacky TV is a thing of the past, apparently. Nobody's got time for nonsense in 2024.

La Brea was, unfortunately, too late for the golden age of filler episodes and in-depth character exploration, but it did its damnedest to give as much as it could, leaving us wishing we could just slow down. In another life, Ty (Chike Okonkwo) and Paara (Tonantzin Carmelo) could have had a whole episode to explore their unexpected romance and eventual 10,000 BC wedding. Veronica (Lily Santiago), a traumatized kidnapping victim, and Lucas (Josh McKenzie), a former heroin dealer, could have spent multiple seasons gaining new confidence and falling in love.

And then there's Gavin, who spent the series learning that he couldn't trust his own memories and he had lived a whole life he didn't remember, including a childhood in 10,000 BC with a mad time-traveling scientist father. His relationship with his family was nearly ruined for good by the memories that had been taken from him, and he barely had a chance to breathe, let alone absorb all that. Plus there's the fact that everyone had time traveled and never really had the time to come to terms with it, or with any of the fantastical things that had happened to them. They barely even had time to get their clothes dirty.

In the end, after a six-episode final season that felt much longer, nearly all the remaining sinkhole survivors were able to walk back into 2021 with new outlooks and no mention of the extensive therapy they likely now need. The Harris family reunited, more intact than they were when they fell/jumped into the sinkhole. Eventually, everyone will have to grieve that their beloved friend/frenemy Levi (Nicholas Gonzalez) died trying to help them only after living a whole separate life and building a family in the 80s and 90s, which he then lost, and which the show spent barely a minute explaining. There was so much here, and had the show been given the chance — the episode count, the budget, the marketing — it could have truly been something. It would never have been a Hall of Fame TV show, nor would it have won Emmys, but it could have at least lived the quietly insane life of a Riverdale or a 9-1-1.

As it is, my friends and family will just always see La Brea as the bad show that I love, the show that only I am allowed to make fun of. They will never get it, and I don't blame them, but I fear they're missing out on the last piece of a TV era we will never see again.

Lauren Piester has been writing about entertainment for a decade at places like E! News, TVGuide.com and The Messenger (R.I.P.). Her parents are thrilled that she turned her TV addiction and questionable tastes into a career, and so are her cats, sometimes. All of her work (even the stuff that got unceremoniously deleted by a greedy billionaire) can be found here.