Influencer culture deserves all the skewering it can get, and Rachel Sennott certainly takes shots at its crushing fatuousness and superficiality with I Love LA.
Unfortunately, she doesn’t aim to kill, instead offering up simply glancing blows via the story of a New York transplant striving to make it big as the manager of an Internet-famous childhood friend.
Unwilling to mercilessly mock its milieu à la The Righteous Gemstones or offer up endearingly relatable characters like Girls (or amusingly aspirational ones like Sex and the City), the actress’ HBO series, premiering Nov. 2, is a largely middling Entourage-y comedy about twentysomethings trying to succeed in an arena where everything is fake, everyone is out for themselves, and no one has a shred of humility. It revels in the hijinks of the shallow and the untalented, in the process squandering the gifts of its own cast.
Doing merely a minor variation on the persona she established in Shiva Baby, Bodies Bodies Bodies, and Bottoms, Sennott is Maia, whose life consists of working for Alyssa (Leighton Meester) at her talent agency Alyssa 180, hanging out with friends Charlie (Jordan Firstman) and Alani (True Whitaker)—he an out-and-proud stylist to the stars, she a trust fund baby living off her Spike Lee-esque dad’s filmmaking fortune—and having playfully dirty sex with boyfriend Dylan (Josh Hutcherson), an elementary school teacher with whom she lives.
Maia wants a promotion but doesn’t have the courage to ask for one, and she’s still fuming over her falling out with former best friend Tallulah (Odessa A’zion), a NYC “It Girl” whom she blocks on her socials for the good of her mental health. No sooner has she done that than Tallulah appears on her doorstep, ready to rekindle their friendship for Maia’s birthday, thus upending her fortunes.
Maia is ambitious and after some bumpy patches, she and Tallulah become best friends, to the point that Maia signs on as her manager—thereby enabling her to move up at Alyssa 180. Most of I Love LA revolves around the duo’s attempts to turn Tallulah into a Kim Kardashian-grade celeb. The thing is, Tallulah doesn’t do anything, and the “content” she produces, such as at a party with a big-time TikToker, is the sort of insipid crud one hastily scrolls past on their feed.
The series is so busy having “fun” with Tallulah and Maia that it never bothers to develop the former as anything more than a gratingly brash, narcissistic nobody whose ticket to the top is brand marketing deals with Ritz crackers and appearances at swanky dinners where making a splash leads to, well, even bigger marketing deals.
When a celebrated fashion designer (The Righteous Gemstones’ Tim Baltz) reduces Tallulah to someone who posts fun videos, gets drunk, and steals things, it’s meant to be a true but mean dismissal. Given her vacuousness, though, it doesn’t come across as caustic so much as just accurate.
Sennott’s familiarity with this world gives I Love LA its authenticity, and she intermittently skewers its ruthlessness and idiocy, as when Maia and Tallulah casually bemoan the fact that a nightclub has fixed its problem with roofying (because being roofied is a blast!), or when Alani nostalgically recounts to a group of creative VPs her first teen romance, which turns out to have been with a married 28-year-old with a newborn.
From Maia badmouthing music videos (“Film a TikTok and move on!”) to Charlie stating that the entire concept of reputations ended in 2017, the series is attuned to 21st-century Gen-Z attitudes and intent on goofing on West Coast entertainment-industry craziness.
I Love LA, however, doesn’t go far enough with its ridicule. Maia and Tallulah are only slightly exaggerated versions of typical Los Angeles fame-seekers, and therefore neither zany enough to elicit real laughs, nor endearing enough to warrant genuine empathy. They’re stuck in the hazy middle, and the same applies to Charlie and Alani, two comedic-relief sidekicks sorely lacking in outrageousness.
Alani’s entire thing is that she’s a head-in-the-clouds nepo baby, but her flightiness is limited. While Charlie is a tad more fleshed out—he has a running feud with a pop-star client as well as a romantic heart—he too feels thin and uninspired. Though the show’s main characters are ripe for parody, Sennott pulls her punches in order to position them as engaging individuals whose personal travails are of meaningful interest.
Sennott and Hutcherson have a likeable yin-yang rapport that suggests there’s more to Maia than careerist drive and carnal wildness. Their relationship’s evolution, however, is conventional and soapy, and generally takes a back seat to Maia’s struggle to turn Tallulah into a sensation—a mission that involves attending A-list parties and putting up with awkward double dates at the home of Alyssa, whom Meester embodies as a typical cutthroat-with-a-smile boss.
With multiple episodes helmed by Hustlers director Lorene Scafaria, I Love LA taps into the city’s alluring (and often tacky) glitz and glamour, and there are asides sprinkled throughout that touch upon the modern means by which people now elevate themselves to name-recognition status. Yet the show feels purposefully dulled, unwilling to truly eviscerate the very style-over-substance culture it presents, deliberately, as artificial, nasty, and hollow.
I Love LA’s narrative is propelled by Maia and company’s reflexive impulse to suck up to anyone who might help them get ahead, and there’s something horrifyingly believable about its depiction of the lengths to which young Los Angelinos will go to compromise their beliefs, desires, morals, and relationships for personal benefit.
Such a portrait is far from flattering, and Sennott appears to know it, which is why it’s so frustrating that she doesn’t take it further, really digging into her characters’ off-putting qualities for satiric humor.
There’s funny material here and there over the course of its eight half-hour episodes, and Sennott remains a charismatic comedian with a sharp tongue and ribald instincts. Yet save for those (likely younger) viewers who can stomach influencers and the inanity they spew, her series will cause few to fall in love with her cherished metropolis.
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