In his seminal video essay “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” a definitive exegesis on the sprawling metropolis and its depiction on screen, critic Thom Andersen takes issue with the city’s nickname. “People blame all sorts of things on the movies,” Andersen argues. “I blame them for the custom of abbreviating the city’s name to ‘L.A.’” Andersen deems the moniker “a slightly derisive diminutive” that indicates “a city with an inferiority complex.” Worst of all, he laments, “When people say ‘L.A.,’ they often mean ‘show business.’”
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The HBO comedy “I Love L.A.” is aptly named, because this is not a show about Los Angeles, a diverse and multitudinous place that can’t be defined by a single industry. It’s a show about L.A., or even “L.A.” in quotation marks: a blank canvas for projection by haters and dreamers alike. Stereotypes about airheads in athleisure and ambitions of fame and fortune are each a form of fantasy. “I Love L.A.” unfolds entirely within this bubble, populated by delusional strivers running on the fumes of substance-free hype. It’s a finer piece of sociology about the influencer era than it is a joke- or even character-driven sitcom. Which is to say, watching “I Love L.A.” made this Angeleno of nearly a decade want to stare at a wall for several hours in numbed-out despair — and I suspect that may be the intended effect.
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“I Love L.A.” was created, executive produced, and at times written and directed by its 30-year-old star Rachel Sennott, a comedian and actress who’s worked her way up from viral clips on social media to starring roles in indie films like “Shiva Baby” and “I Used to Be Funny.” (Sennott has partnered with more experienced hands like director Lorene Scafaria and screenwriter Emma Barrie to bring her vision to life, but there’s a reason the show was announced as “Untitled Rachel Sennott Project,” a name I wish it had kept.) This multihyphenate job description instantly puts Sennott under the same spotlight as her forebears Lena Dunham and Issa Rae, women who were also given the golden ticket of a series on TV’s most prestigious platform at a strikingly young age. In truth, however, “I Love L.A.” bears a closer family resemblance to “Entourage” and “How to Make It in America” — HBO shows about the hustle and grind that goes into evolving models of success. But instead of movie stardom or a clothing empire, the end goal here is converting TikTok followers into cold, hard cash.
Surprisingly given her background, Sennott doesn’t cast herself as the online ingénue whose ascendant career drives the story. Instead, she plays Maia, a New York transplant and aspiring talent manager who sees the growing profile of her estranged friend Tallulah (Odessa A’Zion) as a potential meal ticket for both of them. We never see any of Tallulah’s digital output, which makes it difficult to gauge the nature of her appeal. (Is she funny? Stylish? Just really good at lipsyncing?) I went back and forth on whether this omission was a frustrating oversight or an effective way to underline the emptiness at the heart of the attention economy. With major plotlines hinging on a fashion house offering to send Tallulah a free bag or a potential brand deal with Tresemmé, the point comes across regardless. Tallulah is not an artist with any greater goal than having a good time; in fact, she’s stubbornly opaque, more a bundle of impulses for Maia to try in vain to control than a person with an apparent inner life. There’s no creativity to even attempt to balance out the commerce here — just the pure exchange of clout for corporate sponsorship.
Maia’s friends are similarly distant from what anyone born before 1980 might recognize as entertainment. In a meta wink, True Whitaker — daughter of Forest — plays Alani, the child of a famous actor content with an obviously fake job at his production company; Charlie (Jordan Firstman, another savant of front-facing video) is a stylist who mostly spends his days managing the ego of various pop stars. The only person with a normal 9-to-5 is Maia’s boyfriend Dylan (Josh Hutcherson), a teacher who’s mostly there to point out his partner’s increasing lack of perspective as she expends mental energy on whether Tallulah can score an invite to “the Formé dinner.” Is Formé a magazine? A clothing company? An experimental art project about the depravity of late capitalism? Your guess is as good as mine!
The location-specific material in “I Love L.A.” is thin at best; in the series’ opening scene, an earthquake interrupts Dylan and Maia having sex, a joke that’s thuddingly obvious in a very literal sense as objects go flying. There’s a reference to the same line magnet of a Silver Lake bagel shop that’s also invoked by “Nobody Wants This,” which shoots in the same handful of neighborhoods. (And shares cast members like Leighton Meester, who plays Maia’s undermining boss.) I rolled my eyes when Charlie, spurned by the barista at his favorite coffee haunt — Canyon, of course! — asks if he’s supposed to “wait in line like I’m an assistant at UTA.” The crew wear T-shirts advertising legacy businesses like Dan Tana’s and Wi Spa, substituting proper nouns for a more subtly crafted sense of place. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel filled with water from Echo Park Lake.
But there’s territory Sennott knows a lot better than a city she moved to in the fall of 2020, and it shows. A feud between Tallulah and another influencer prompts a meeting with a crisis PR professional, played by Josh Brener of “Silicon Valley,” who’s completely unfazed opposite the anxious panic Sennott plays so well. “It’s two monkeys throwing shit at each other until they get tired,” he says of the public spat, before cynically rolling out his typical apology timeline: “You wait three days for racism, two for homophobia. Antisemitism, you respond right away.” The entire playbook is in service of keeping Tallulah “brand safe.” This nihilism cuts deep, as does a cameo from popular personality Quenlin Blackwell as herself. Her advice to Tallulah? “If you stop for a second, you will fucking disappear.”
“I Love L.A.” is not as joke-dense as “The Other Two,” the dearly departed gold standard for contemporary media satire. That’s a reasonable route to take, but requires deepening the characters’ emotional lives to get results with pathos in lieu of punchlines. In this light, the underdevelopment of the Tallulah-Maia relationship becomes the series’ Achilles heel; we’re never made to understand exactly why the two drifted apart, or how the manager-client dynamic affects a status quo we don’t grasp in the first place. Charlie gets a couple arcs that show “I Love L.A.” at its highs and lows. In one, he struggles to voice his feelings for a crush with whom he shares some vaguely defined history, a plight that left me indifferent to the outcome; in the other, falling in with a group of extremely earnest Christian guys causes Charlie to question his own friends’ reflexive insincerity. The latter achieves a mix of specific observation and surprising resonance I’d like to see more of in a seemingly inevitable Season 2, given how abruptly the eight-episode season ends.
What “I Love L.A.” pursues with far more intensity than humor is a cool factor, at times mirroring Maia and company’s desperate scheming for the same. Though the soundtrack, overseen by music supervisor Ian Broucek, scans slightly vintage — LCD Soundsystem, Metric, Peaches — for a show that wants to speak to its moment, the outfits curated by costume designer Christina Flannery are firmly Gen Z. (This survivor of the aughts cringed at Tallulah’s thong peeking out of low-rise pants, but would gladly purchase Charlie’s T-shirt emblazoned with a Cher tweet.) A detour to New York naturally, predictably opens in the middle of uber-hip Dimes Square. It’s an aesthetic sourced from trend pieces that will doubtless fuel dozens more, an ouroboros of signifiers. Whether “I Love L.A.” is commenting on the times or simply embodying them, I can already hear Maia asking: As long as it gets people talking, does it really matter?
“I Love LA” will premiere on HBO and HBO Max on Nov. 2 at 10:30pm ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.