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Makuochi Echebiri is a News Writer for Collider. He has been interested in creative writing from as far back as high school, and he would consume pretty much anything that’s film or TV. However, his truest love lies in the presence of historical epics and thrillers.
Lured by the brilliance of Middle Earth from an early age both in print and on screen, his palate has since expanded to other realms including Westeros, Kattegat among others. He also possesses a great appetite for the stories that emanate from the vastness of space. Even though he is no Avenger.
Obsessed with storytelling and having works of his own that have yet to make it to print, he is content to use that ability to communicate to as many as are reachable. In his spare time, he looks out for avenues where he can aid people aside from his plans to reign over this earthly realm. Yes…you heard that first here.
When La Brea premiered on NBC, it immediately set off Lost alarm bells: ordinary people, a sudden catastrophe, prehistoric weirdness, and mysteries stacked on top of mysteries, and critics were like, “We’ve seen this before.” Like many genre shows that dared to chase the mystery-box high, La Brea was branded a shameless attempt to recapture the magic of Lost, then picked apart for its pulpy plotting, cheesy dialogue, and increasingly unhinged mythology. The irony was that the foundation was solid. The high-concept premise had all the right pieces, but the execution often felt uneven. And yet, long after its finale, the series has delivered a staggering streaming performance as it finds itself among Netflix's most-watched sci-fi shows of 2025.
Unlike Manifest, which leaned heavily into mirroring Lost’s structure, La Brea swung for something bolder. Instead of an air disaster in the middle of nowhere, the catastrophe strikes right in the heart of Los Angeles, where a massive sinkhole mysteriously opens and swallows entire city blocks, plunging buildings and people into a dangerous, primeval world below. Those trapped in this prehistoric landscape are forced to band together and find a way back to the surface, while the loved ones left behind scramble to understand what happened. At the center of it all is the Harris family, torn quite literally in two, with Gavin (Eoin Macken) and daughter Izzy (Zyra Gorecki) above ground, desperate to reconnect with the rest of their family lost beneath the sinkhole.
The critical verdict on La Brea was swift and unforgiving. Season 1 limped to a 29% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the site’s consensus bluntly noting, “There may be method to its madness, but La Brea simply doesn’t commit to its insane premise hard enough to shake out a show worth watching — at least not yet.” Audiences, however, initially showed up. The series debuted to more than six million viewers, signalling real curiosity around its high-concept hook. Unfortunately, that momentum didn’t last. Ratings steadily declined as the mythology grew more unwieldy, and the show ultimately wrapped after three seasons, a run that, at the time, seemed to confirm critics’ early doubts.
'La Brea' Was One of Netflix's Most Watched Sci-fi Shows in the First Half of 2025
La Brea aired its third and final season in February 2024, with the finale drawing just over two million viewers, a far cry from the six million who tuned in for the debut. But ironically, the show subsequently grew in popularity on streaming. The series has since been made available to stream on Netflix in international territories, and in 2025, the series seemed to have found quite an audience. According to FlixPatrol data, Seasons 1 and 2 racked up roughly 60 million hours viewed, becoming the third and seventh most-watched sci-fi series in the January-to-June 2025 window. It's an impressive turnaround for a show once dismissed as a knockoff. Perhaps, part of its appeal lies in its “makes no sense, but I can’t stop watching” factor. Viewers may roll their eyes, but they can’t look away.
La Brea is streaming for free on Tubi in the US and on Netflix in several international territories.
Release Date 2021 - 2024-00-00
English (US) ·