La Brea Review: Day Two (Season 1 Episode 2)
La Brea Season 1 Episode 2, “Day Two,” attempts to justify its own existence but doesn’t make it very far.
Ultimately, that’s the big thing that this show has to answer for us. When we already have Lost and plenty of other shows that have attempted that same survival template, even going back to something like Earth 2, what then is the point of this series existing? What does this have to offer that a bunch of its predecessors hasn’t already done?
If this second episode is any indication, there isn’t really anything that makes it stand out. It is just going along with a formula but doesn’t like it has anything substantial to present of its own. When comparisons to Terra Nova start to come to mind, then there is a very severe problem at hand.
It’s trying to evoke a comfortable feeling for fans of that genre. It’s playing on familiar tropes of survival shows, like we have to go out and medicine for someone hurt.
What La Brea doesn’t seem to understand is that when it calls those shows to mind, it just makes want to watch Lost or Jericho instead. It isn’t doing itself any favors by making us constantly remember other series that have done this better and in more interesting ways.
This feels like someone wanted to make a sequel to Lost but no one would let them so then they just made this instead. It’s not wrong for this show to want to be Lost but it drastically misunderstands what made it successful in the first place. It thinks that you need mysteries and world-building and plot contrivances, which are all perfectly fine.
What made Lost stand out — then and now — is that there were richly drawn and intricate characters tossed into those things. The polar bears only mattered so that you could have something for the characters to react against. Yes, there were a lot of people who were very interested in what was actually happening on Lost it was, first and foremost, a character-based drama.
In that sense, La Brea has put the cart before the horse because the characters here feel like broad templates. They are all, practically without exception, bland archetypes that hardly feel like they have ever existed in the real world. Two episodes in and there’s no emotional attachment.
This is not helped at all by any of the performances. Natalie Zea is ostensibly the lead of the show and she feels like she’s sleepwalking. She’s an incredibly talented actress but all of her dialogue might as well be accompanied by a yawn. The same could be said for any actor present.
When Star Trek: Voyager was filming, the producers and director would tell the actors playing human characters to dull down their performances to make the aliens in the scenes really pop in comparison. That’s an example of minimalist acting being used to service the show but what does the acting on La Brea serve? It only seems to make for bad television.
It’s really difficult to tell at this point what this show’s goals even are or what it’s trying to do. If it doesn’t establish that soon, then it’s hard to see this surviving more than a few episodes.
What did you think of this episode of La Brea? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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La Brea airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on NBC.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.