Netflix subscribers are just days away from being able to stream NBC’s canceled three-season sci-fi series that deserves a cult classic status. The streaming giant has been bringing more and more NBC titles to the platform in recent months, with shows like Happy’s Place, St. Denis Medical, and The Hunting Party all available. The lineup will grow on May 1st when every episode of a failed NBC sci-fi show drops.
That show is La Brea, and it will soon be streaming on Netflix, absurd time traveling prehistoric chaos and all. For those unfamiliar, the David Appelbaum-created series centers around a group of survivors who must band together to survive when a massive sinkhole opens in Los Angeles and plunges them into a dangerous primeval land. La Brea originally premiered on NBC in 2021, but amid poor reviews, declining viewership in its second season, high production costs, and industry-wide strikes, NBC opted to end the series with a shortened six-episode third season, which wrapped in 2024. Two years later, all 30 episodes of La Brea are scheduled to drop on Netflix on May 1st.
You probably won’t find La Brea topping any ”best of” lists. In fact, the series had a generally poor reception, earning just a 29% critic score in its debut season on Rotten Tomatoes and only averaging a 46% audience rating across all three seasons. But while La Brea isn’t high-quality television, it’s solid so-bad-it’s-good TV that really feels like a throwback to cheesy, high-concept 1990s or early 2000s sci-fi.
The series centers on a completely ridiculous premise of a massive sinkhole in Los Angeles that transports survivors to a dangerous 10,000 B.C. world, and it only gets wilder from there, La Brea featuring too many common genre tropes to count, including sudden portals, psychic visions, secret government conspiracies, and even a man out of time paradox. The plotlines are implausible, the characters are cliché, and the CGI is shockingly bad, but all of that messiness just adds to the show’s campy weeknight watch charm that has resulted in fans labeling it “gloriously, brazenly bad” and “grade A dumb TV.” It’s enjoyable escapism that blends survival, family drama, and fantastical elements, including prehistoric animals, to create an addictively absurd, fast-paced adventure that has all the makings of a future cult gem.
There’s still a week to go before La Brea arrives on Netflix, but the streamer has plenty of other fresh options to help pass the time. Netflix has spent April growing its streaming lineup with dozens of new TV and movie arrivals. On the TV side of things, subscribers can now stream the debut seasons of fellow NBC shows Happy’s Place and St. Denis Medical, as well as Netflix originals including XO, Kitty Season 3, Beef Season 2, and Big Mistakes. For movies, the streamer has stocked films like the Mission: Impossible movies, IF, Scream, Halloween Ends, and the new original shark survival thriller Thrash.
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