Netflix will add every episode of La Brea on May 1, giving the canceled NBC sci-fi series a fresh shot at an audience years after it first premiered in 2021. The move puts all 30 episodes, spread across three seasons, in one place just as the show’s odd mix of disaster drama and time travel has become exactly the sort of thing streaming audiences tend to rediscover.
La Brea follows survivors forced to band together after a massive sinkhole opens in Los Angeles and drops them into a dangerous primeval land in 10,000 B.C. NBC ended the series with a shortened six-episode third season, which wrapped in 2024. Its run was never a critical triumph: the debut season drew a 29% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, and the show averaged a 46% audience rating across all three seasons, but that never stopped some viewers from embracing it as gloriously, brazenly bad television or, as others put it, grade A dumb TV.
The new streaming home arrives after the show was canceled amid poor reviews, declining viewership in its second season, high production costs and the industry-wide strikes that helped tighten network schedules. That history makes the Netflix addition less a revival than a second life, and it gives La Brea a chance to be judged on the thing it always had in abundance: spectacle, sincerity and a premise so unabashedly out there that it may work better as a cult gem than it ever did as a broadcast series.
What happens next is simple enough. On May 1, Netflix makes the full run available, and viewers decide whether La Brea was merely a curious failure or the sort of glorious mess people keep coming back to once the pressure to be serious is gone.