In her Gen Z hangout comedy I Love L.A., Rachel Sennott lovingly holds a mirror up to the city’s 20-something transplants. As with the city itself, there is a lot to love about the latest generation of young adults to be chewed up and spit out in L.A., even if they could stand to work on a few things, too.
“I wanted to obviously not take ourselves too seriously,” Sennott acknowledges. However, there are a lot of distinct obstacles that her generation has come up against while coming of age, and she wanted to be honest about those.
“It’s hard,” she says of the road blocks Gen Z has faced. For the record, Sennott considers herself a “zillennial,” adding that the problems are more severe for those a few years younger than her.
“Especially if I look at my younger siblings,” she continued. “One of my sisters went to college for one year, then had to come home for COVID. My other sister is doing high school on Zoom…then there’s strikes. The government isn’t — ” she briefly pauses here — “the job market, all of it, it’s just hard. We’re not able to accomplish the same things our parents were at this age. It feels like nothing you do is ever enough. There’s way too much information on our phones. [There’s] images in my mind that I will never delete…”
She trails off. In other words, the list goes on.
The last decade has proven to be quite a turbulent one in which to come of age, Sennott argues, giving her characters a different perspective on that universal period in life.
Sennott executive produces and showruns with Emma Barrie, a self-described “elderly millennial” who says the pair were set up on a “blind date” by HBO, but “it was love at first sight, because we vibed really quickly.”
As she says it, Sennott chimes in with an affirmative, “We just vibed.”
The two first-time showrunners combined Sennott’s perspective on coming of age in the internet generation and Barrie’s experience in a writers room, including on HBO’s Barry, to get the series off the ground.
“Rachel was my window into a generation younger than me who, we all went through COVID, but she went through COVID in a way that was way more detrimental to her settling into her career, and she missed her years of really being able to f*ck around and feel it out. It is a generation to be taken very seriously. They are often made fun of by people who don’t understand them,” Barrie said.
Enter the friend group at the center of I Love L.A., which Sennott says “represent different responses to what the generation has been through.”
There’s her character Maia, an overachieving perfectionist who is white knuckling her way through her career despite few connections and a boss who is not all that concerned with her upward mobility. “She’s like, ‘I will get the last job on the Titanic as it sinks,’” Sennott muses.
Then there’s Tallulah, who Sennott says “is a little bit more of a nihilist.” She’s an influencer who marches to the beat of her own drum and doesn’t seem all that concerned with societal standards for success. There’s also Alani (True Whitaker), an unaffected nepo baby who just wants everyone to get along, and Charlie (Jordan Firstman), an aspiring designer who is carving his own path after deciding the traditional routes weren’t working for him.
The foil to all of these characters is Josh Hutcherson as Maia’s boyfriend Dylan. He’s a teacher who is a bit older than Maia and her friends and, at times, seems completely disconnected from their version of reality.
“I think Dylan was someone who could have been condescending…but Josh just brought this art to it. He gels so well with the rest of the cast, and you feel like he is living in a different world a little bit, but he’s never making fun of that other world,” Barrie said.
Agreeing, Sennott says the goal with building out the central friend group was to have “all these different perspectives and responses to being this age right now and not really judging any of them as the right or wrong way to do it.”
“There’s humor and comedy to be had there, but I think, also, I didn’t want to feel like we were making fun of our characters before we met them,” she continued. “We wanted to look at the characters with empathy.”
The show, which Sennott pitches as “Entourage for internet girls,” is also a bit more self-reflective than it may seem on its surface. I Love L.A. is all about the dualities of the namesake city and its young people, but when it came to creating the show, Sennott applied that same type of reflection inward.
“I think part of it was going through my Saturn Return, and I feel like this thing sort of happens — my early 20s were really chaotic. My mid-20s, I was like, ‘Okay, I’m locking in. I know my life. I’m done.’ And then at the end of my 20s, I feel like that kind of early version of myself came [out] and things got chaotic again, which was scary, but good,” she observed.
“In a way, Tallulah almost represents me when I was younger, me when I lived in New York, and Maya is sort of like me where I was a couple years ago, which is like the most anxious, control-freaky [person], and sort of like the collision of the two,” she added. “The thing is, Maya and Tallulah are better together. I think that [was a] period where things got shaken up again, but all for the better…I think, in your late 20s, everyone is sort of picking their path, and it’s a little scary. You’re like, ‘Wait guys, what are we doing?’ and sort of [are] feeling a little isolated or scared. And I think it’s a lot about that, too.”
I Love L.A. premiered Sunday night on HBO. New episodes air Sundays at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and HBO Max.
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