La Brea first teaser: NBC’s new sci-fi series opens time-bending sinkhole on a terrifying ancient world

Can anyone explain how there’s a hole in the Earth — the kind that supernaturally swallows up hapless Los Angeles residents and spits them out in the frightening primeval past? That’s just the first mystery launching with NBC’s La Brea, the highly awaited sci-fi series that’s set to make its TV debut this fall.

The genre-bending new series dropped a look at its first teaser today, showing a city ravaged and in panic (can you really run from a sinkhole?) before the dust finally clears. Key characters including Gavin Harris (Nightflyers’ Eoin Macken) and his daughter Izzy (Zyra Gorecki) find themselves stranded from the rest of their family in the aftermath — separated by what seems to be eons and eons of time.

Check it out:

On the other side of the time warp are Gavin’s wife and son, all while a “disparate group of strangers” work alongside the family’s stranded half to “uncover the mystery of where they are and if there is a way back home,” according to NBC’s earlier series description. Are all these stuck strangers merely the random victims of fate, or might they be connected by something deeper?

Like a quake that can strike at any time, La Brea’s keeping those kind of details buried deep beneath the surface for now. But no matter how unrelated their past lives may have been, “[t]hose who fell in ... have no choice but to band together to survive,” NBC teases. “Meanwhile, the rest of the world desperately seeks to understand what happened. In the search for answers, one family torn apart by this disaster will have to unlock the secrets of this inexplicable event to find a way back to each other.”

Written by series showrunner David Appelbaum (The Enemy Within), who also serves as an executive producer, La Brea features Macken and Gorecki alongside a cast including Natalie Zea, Jack Martin, Jon Seda, Chiké Okonkwo, Nicholas Gonzalez, Karina Logue, and more. Avi Nir, Alon Shtruzman, Peter Traugott, Rachel Kaplan, Steven Lilien, Bryan Wynbrandt, and Ken Woodruff also serve as executive producers.

Keep that seismometer handy for a signal on La Brea’s soon-to-be-revealed premiere date at NBC, where the show’s first season will air on Tuesdays this fall.

(NBC and SYFY WIRE are both owned by NBCUniversal.)