From sentiments expressed in this thread, that would apparently be “not soon enough!”
It was just too much happening all at once. Lost didn’t have that problem; although there were a lot of people and happenings in the series, Lost did a better job adding new characters and mysteries a few at a time.
It was nice to see Natalie Zea again; I miss The Detour so much! I might see if I can find some way to watch that again (at least the first two seasons).
Watched the pilot last night. It was as beautifully stupid as promised in this thread. I remember with great fondness the sheer nonsensical lunacy of season 2 of “Under the Dome” several years back. Season one followed the Stephen King book fairly closely, and it was supposed to be a one season and done miniseries, but it got popular and got picked up for another season. And the writers had no clue what to do with the story from that point, and the show went amazingly, deliciously off the rails into looney toons town. That’s how I sold “La Brea” to my wife— “I heard it has the potential for ‘Under the Dome’ levels of ridiculousness!”
Me too! She deserves a better show than this, but at least she must be making better bank on a big marquee NBC show than she did on The Detour, while it lasts, anyway.
I was really looking forward to this show, and so disappointed. The acting was beyond bad, and too many stereotypes to keep up with. The prehistoric animals are really fake-looking, too. They could have saved them for later in the series, at least.
When I first saw the cgi prehistoric birds flying out of the sinkhole I thought, nice to see the CGI guy for Birdemic is still getting work. Looks like his skills marginally improved 
La Brea on NBC.
Didn’t know it was possible. It got even WORSE.
- The show could now be titled “Count The Stereotypes!”.
- Conversely, it could be called “Torture The Cis Het White Guys” show.
- Bad CGI is now even worse.
- Its amazing that a hundred-foot fall off a cliff onto one’s back can be easily cured by a hike across the forest.
- Why, yes, the government isn’t surprised about the sudden onset of psychic powers.
- And yes, the government knows all about the space/time warps, and has been hiding them for three years. Because soldiers definitely know not to gossip about space time warps in the mojave desert.
Wow. Its… actually getting bad in its badness.
The cleanliness of the area where the sinkhole deposited the victims is jarring to me. It’s a nature preserve with some scattered vehicles and damaged buildings. What happened to all the thousands of tons of earth and rock that fell through the Time Rift ©®? It selectively deposited the humans safely on the ground, slightly smashed the cars and buildings, and vanished the dirt and rocks completely? They should have woken up on a mountain of debris. The buildings should have been absolutely shredded from coming apart as the lip of the sinkhole progressively fell away beneath them.
I don’t see how the show can make any sense without aliens, sleestaks, or some other intelligence deliberately causing the Time Rift to function in this inconsistent manner. Well, except for the possibility that none of it is real, and Gavin has been hallucinating everything due to the head injury from his plane crash three years ago.
Those city dwellers sure do have some awesome path-finding abilities when walking in unfamiliar woods. Despite it being “miles away” they have yet to get even the tiniest bit lost.
I watched about 10 minutes of this dreck of a latest episode, and turned it off. Then I deleted my recording settings for it.
It could have been done so differently… sigh.
I don’t even have to delete my settings. NBC has been removed from my Dish feed due to them wanting more money. Winner.
I watched the first 2 episodes. Wow. This is bad. People making “too stupid to live” choices routinely. Crap special effects. The special effects were so bad they just shouldn’t have used them at all. The wolves? They couldn’t get a dog or two instead of that CGI crap? I like the lead actress and a few of the others, but this show is terrible.
I don’t think we’ll be watching any more after this. My husband suggested re-watching Lost. 
Is “RUN!!!” going to be La Brea’s “It’s complicated”?
I’m not willing to rewatch to check, but I think someone has shouted RUN!! several times in each episode so far. And they have had a continuing string of situations to want to run away from: the sink hole, the wolves, the saber toothed tigers, the wolves again, the tigers again…
Nobody seems to have any idea about maybe forming a defensible retreat, or create weapons, or anything useful. Just stray around gormlessly, wait for the next danger, and then shout RUN!!! So useful.
Also, these cars that fell in, weren’t they presumably carrying commuters on their way to jobs in LA? What are the odds that many of them had more than a snack bar or packed lunch and maybe a bottle of water? It’s been several days showtime – why aren’t they panicking over finding a water source and something to eat?
I was hoping for a new hate-watch a la Under the Dome, but it doesn’t even sink/rise to that level.
I’m not sure about that. I watched last night’s in jaw-dropping disbelief. Let’s see, we got a giant sloth vacuuming up their entire food supply, some of the LaBreans (we need a term for the people who fell through the Rift) chased into a cave by a bear, that proceeded to rip away at the entry until it collapsed the cave entry trapping them, a pre-med dropout forced to perform spinal surgery on her father because he was becoming paralyzed after having fallen down a hundred foot cliff and then walking a mile or so back to camp, the rescue plane sent in bursts into flame and yet apparently lands safely enough to not kill the pilot, who, btw, is apparently in love with the leading lady of the LaBreans whose husband provides the psychic link back topside, and they found the body of some other modern human who apparently got there some years ago and suicided out of despair, and they had to swim through an underwater passage in the cave to get out, oh, and the main guy assisting the lead lady reveals he has a brain tumor, and – My god, I picture the writing team sitting around competing for the most extreme cliches scenarios they could possibly shoe horn into this disaster.
And then LeadingLady of the LaBreans solves the food problem by finding a tree covered in “hen and chickens” mushrooms and bringing back a knapsack full of them to feed everyone. According to Google, a cup of cooked mushrooms provides about 15 calories. Let’s go with 1k calories per day providing a ‘slowly starving’ level of intake for an average human. We’ve seen at least two dozen LaBreans. So LLotLB’s must have hauled home 66.7 cups worth of mushroom for each of them? In one knapsack? That’s impressive.
Oh, and to my earlier post: we didn’t actually get a “RUN!!!” this time. But we did get a whispered “Don’t run” when the bear shows up, followed by a “Now run!” after they try to distract the bear by releasing the rabbit they’s snared, so I think I’ll call that good enough.
You forgot Heroin-Boy and his daddy-killing, food-hoarding, cop-of-a-mom.
I think instead of watching, I’ll just come here for snarky recaps. Y’all are hilarious!
I’ll join you.
The pre-med student being expected to be able to do medical things is one of the many, many things that the show gets wrong. I was pre-med. We slogged through bio and chemistry. We did not spend any time on actual medical procedures. A med school student would have been a better choice.
(fantastically written recap follows)
Yeah, the show isn’t quite reaching the sheer levels of utterly laughable ridiculousness that Season 2 Under the Dome did, but it’s close.
I just hope it doesn’t do to Natalie Zea’s career what UTD seems to have done to Dean Norris’ career. In 2013 he was coming off an amazing run as the Hank character in Breaking Bad. Seems like he should have been destined for greater things, but he took the part in UTD and afterward seems to have bounced around in a lot of relatively minor stuff, never amounting to much. I can almost imagine the talk with his agent…
Agent: Everybody loves what you did in BB, Dean. You’re going to be able to write your own ticket in Hollywood from now on as a major character actor! I’m sure I’m going to be overwhelmed with TV and movie offers for you any day now! In the meantime, there’s this script for something called ‘Under the Dome’-- it’s just a one-season miniseries, might be a bit of a lark, keep you busy until the offers start rolling in…
Dean Norris: UTD, eh? Yeah, I read the Stephen King book-- It was pretty good. Ending kinda sucked, but most of King’s endings do these days. One season, eh-- that’s set in stone, right? Might be a fun change of pace after BB. How bad can it be…?
I’ve watched the first two episodes, but I was kind of on the fence on whether to watch the 3rd or just delete it.
But this sounds like it could be a suitable replacement for Manifest, which I watched primarily for the jaw-dropping twists and turns and the unbelievable character entanglements (the core mystery had become so convoluted it was no longer worth trying to keep up with the potential solutions).
Still a week behind, but they just carbon-dated a diamond ring, so they’ve set the bar for “realistic science” about as low as it can go.