La Brea Review: The Storm (Season 1 Episode 7)
La Brea Season 1 Episode 7, “The Storm,” sees the survivors preparing for a snowstorm while two of their own are exiled from the camp.
The problem with La Brea isn’t that it’s a bad show. It is but it could potentially get away with that if that is all of it. On top of that, it is also boring and has no substance to it. It’s as if you ate cotton candy but it was flavored with something abominable. Now there’s a bad taste in your mouth and your stomach is unsatisfied.
That is every of this show and it seems to only be compounding with every consecutive week. Each and every episode, we are watching nothing unfold. It is perhaps the greatest personification of nothingness that has ever existed. If nothing else, someone went out and made a black hole into a tv show and that has to be somewhat applauded.
A show is allowed to be a certain amount of bad. The scales have to be adjusted, though, with something minorly redeeming about it. Terra Nova wasn’t perfect but it at least had the possibility for a dinosaur to appear. La Brea doesn’t have that. There aren’t bright spots to the show.
It’s a trainwreck from every possible point of view. Anything that one could point to as evidence of its fractional proficiency are things that other shows have explicitly done better. To add to that, La Brea feels a compulsive need to draw our eye to those better shows at every possible opportunity.
We all know that this show is derivative and is a blatant fan fiction of Lost but it goes out of its way to point that out. It needs us all to know that it’s drawing heavily from other shows. This is, at best, deeply insecure writing and, at worst, plagiarization worthy of a lawsuit.
There’s a certain amount of Chekov’s Gun at work here that especially makes the episode feel like a failure. If a character comes running up and starts spouting how dangerous this storm is, then we should really have some sense of that. This is apparently a storm so bad that they need to take cover.
There’s no real danger to it, though, beyond Marybeth and Lucas getting trapped. There is no need for it to be an actual snowstorm. The show gets to the same place if it’s a normal bad patch of weather. If it’s a snowstorm, it should feel like it’s unsafe to be out in the elements. That isn’t what happens, though.
The show picks this particular storm for the aesthetics and to be a subversion of normal LA weather. It’s done because the show thinks it’s being clever and not because they actually want to commit to it in any way. It’s gone just as quickly as it comes and everyone knows from the jump that it’s only there so Eve and Marybeth won’t have to leave by the end of it.
There’s no concern for safety because we don’t actually care for any of these characters. It wouldn’t matter if the storm had raged on for the rest of the season because there’s no danger here. We would have to have any interest in these people and their safety for that to happen and that just doesn’t exist.
What did you think of this episode of La Brea? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Critic Rating:
User Rating:
La Brea airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on NBC.
Follow us on Twitter and on 
Instagram!
Want more from Tell-Tale TV? Subscribe to our newsletter here!
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.
One thought on “La Brea Review: The Storm (Season 1 Episode 7)”
The problem is not that La Brea is a bad show. It’s that it’s a very, very bad show. And since you’re apparently the only other human who’s actually watching this endless pit of a show, I’ll share my favorite observation. The hut that the old man made with the red hand print on it? I call that “Paw-paw’s Paw Pod”.
You’re welcome.
Comments are closed.