So terrible it’s wonderful... like Lost on a budget of 32p
La Brea
Paramount+/Channel 5, Monday ★ (and also ★★★★★ if you can embrace how bad it is) Vicky Pattison, Alcohol, Dad And Me
Channel 4, Tuesday ★★★☆☆
The drama series La Brea begins when a massive sinkhole opens in Los Angeles, pulling cars, buildings and people into its depths and into another, parallel world set in 10,000BC. It’s one of those shows that is both one star and five stars because it is so terrible that, if properly embraced, it can transport you all the way to a joy that is wholly disbelieving, but a joy nonetheless.
It most put me in mind of Lost, but on a budget of, say, 32p, and it seems unfair to pick a favourite moment, but it’s possibly the one when a wedding ring is sent for carbon-dating to check if it’s from prehistory, and I’m thinking: ‘Whoa, my friends, I’m no scientist, but I think you’ll find that carbontesting is only applicable to objects that were once living material.’ As someone who failed physics O-level, I can’t even begin to describe how brilliantly smart this made me feel.
In the opening scene, Eve (Natalie Zea) is driving her teen kids, Izzy (Zyra Gorecki) and Josh (Jack Martin), to school when a dog starts barking – which is never a good sign – and a crack in the road gives way to the gigantic sinkhole which, from the look of the CGI, cost at least 6p of the 32p budget.
Cars, vans and buildings are swallowed, as are hundreds of people, including Josh and then Eve. Izzy tries to save Eve, hanging on to her for dear life, but no, she’s gone. ‘It was my fault!’ Izzy will cry. Love, look around. This isn’t just about you. Other script gems will include ‘I’m a doctor, I can help!’ and ‘The only way we’re going to get through this is together!’, and on more than one occasion I laughed until my drink come out of my nose. It’s that special.
Back to the story. Eve comes to in a field, unbruised, and it’s 10,000BC, and what you didn’t know about 10,000BC until now is that it’s a place where your hair will always look as if it’s been personally styled and tousled by John Frieda. Josh is here – ‘JOSH!’, ‘MOM!’ – as well as a small group of other survivors. At least these are complex characters. I’m kidding you. They’re all onedimensional and obviously hiding some secret or other. Plus, this has no external logic, no internal logic, or even any logic that happened to be passing and thought it would drop by. If many didn’t survive, where are the corpses? The cars and trucks and buses that fell through are still all intact?
Meanwhile, a mobile phone travels back to 10,000BC, and it’s still charged? But these survivors are more concerned with the prowling wolves, which must have taken up another 3p of that CGI budget, but possibly only 2p. As for above ground, in modern LA we meet Eve’s exhusband, Gavin (Eoin Macken), a former pilot who has had visions ever since his plane crashed in the Mojave Desert because, it seems, another sinkhole opened up there, which the authorities covered up. He can see Eve and Josh and begins every sentence with: ‘I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but…’ He digs up Eve’s wedding ring, which the scientists agree to carbon-date because, as we’ve established, they’re not as smart as me.
Only the first episode was shown on Channel 5, and you’ll have to subscribe to
Paramount – which owns Channel 5 – to see the rest. I’m tempted.
There are many dramas that are meh, but few that are as wonderfully bad as this. It may be worth paying.
I’ve left the best news to last. Get this: a second season has already been commissioned! Vicky Pattison was, apparently, the loud, often intoxicated one on the reality TV show Geordie Shore. As I never watched it, I have to take that on trust, and in Vicky Pattison: Alcohol, Dad And Me she (kind of) explored her relationship with drink. Her father is an alcoholic and she asked if, being an alcoholic herself, she was destined to make the same mistakes.
This type of confessional television is now in vogue (most recently it was Joe Wicks), and I hate to sound like everyone’s disapproving ma, but isn’t serious work needed in these instances? Rather than a TV show?
Vicky seemed lovely and supercaring, and there was an especially moving moment when she and her father met a (lacklustre) therapist and Vicky said to her dad, in effect, give up drink and I will be with you every step of the way, but if you don’t I’ll have to cut you out my life. And yet still her father couldn’t promise.
She talked to this expert and that, as well as other children of alcoholics, but still I wasn’t sure. What is the extent of her own drinking? Is it just when she goes out? What is her fear surrounding giving it up altogether? If you think you might be an alcoholic, can you merely cut down?
This was never investigated, but I hope it is happening off screen. Which is maybe the best place for it.