Photo: HBO
I Love LA doesn’t do a particularly good job announcing itself with its pilot, so to give you a better sense, I’ll spoil a joke. (If you’d prefer not to know this spoiler, feel free to skip to the next paragraph, but I assure you: This is not the show’s best or most interesting punch line.) In the second episode, Rachel Sennott’s Maia and Odessa A’zion’s Tallulah meet with the latter’s rival from New York, a polished blonde influencer who claims Tallulah stole her Balenciaga bag. The visit is meant to mend fences; naturally, it devolves into a cocaine-fueled nightmare caught on video. The footage leaks online, and Maia’s gentle teacher boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson), learns his coke-snorting face has become a meme, “Coke Larry,” while chaperoning the school carnival. (“Because I’m doing coke and they say I look like my name would be Larry,” he tells Maia desperately.) As his dowdy principal approaches, Dylan braces for the inevitable: getting fired, fighting with his girlfriend — the classic spiral. “Are you Coke Larry?” the principal asks and Dylan sheepishly confirms. “I’ve got a … golf trip next weekend?” his boss stammers. “A couple of high-school buddies of mine. I don’t want to let them down …” The beat stretches, the principal is eventually pulled away (“Great job on those snickerdoodles!”), and Dylan realizes he has to procure coke for his boss. That shouldn’t be a problem, though; Maia’s buddy will hook him up. The show moves on, as if to say, This is L.A. after all.
The heart of a series like I Love LA lies in its ability to capture what it feels like to be young — when your heart still sings with possibility and ambition, a vital defense in a world all too ready to pelt you with disappointments. When you’re starting your career, you have not yet learned how to be properly cynical (another excellent half-hour debut from this year, FX’s Adults, vibrates at the same frequency), and Maia and Tallulah’s relationship gives the show a buoyant us-against-the-world energy, a sense of shared delusion and drive that powers both its comedy and its ache. This type of striving 20-something comedy draws the unavoidable comparisons — Insecure for the influencer age, Girls for zillennials, Broad City out west — but I Love LA ultimately adds up to far more than the sum of its lineage.
As Maia, Sennott plays into and against the flopping-sexpot persona she honed in filmwork like Shiva Baby, Bottoms, and Bodies Bodies Bodies. Maia’s eager and ambitious in the way you have to be to break through in Los Angeles, and her boss at the creative agency Alyssa 180 doesn’t quite take her seriously. (The titular Alyssa is played by a scene-stealing Leighton Meester, on quite the run right after setting the house on fire in Nobody Wants This.) Maia is supported by an inner circle including stylist Charlie (Jordan Firstman), kind but clueless nepo baby Alani (True Whitaker), and Dylan, whose interests skew more toward board games and World War II than TikTok and brand deals. Their status quo shatters when Maia’s former bestie, buzzy “It” girl Tallulah, blows into town, and by the end of the pilot, an estrangement born of distance and perceived success gives way to a renewed connection: Maia sees an opportunity to work with Tallulah, reigniting both her career and their friendship. That first episode suffers from the need to do so much heavy lifting and feels both overstuffed and overly conventional, but once all the pieces are in place, the show relaxes into itself and its actual voice emerges.
I Love LA is a showcase for Sennott, who also created and writes on it, and Maia’s funniest moments spring from cringe humor, including a standout jealous outburst taken to sublime extremes. What makes Maia so compelling is how the character seems to be a mystery to herself. She hustles without knowing why or what it’ll cost her, and that ambition leads to clashes with Alyssa. Whenever their conflict comes to a head, Sennott’s face betrays a fascinating tension: committed yet confused, a deer in the headlights gripping a knife. Her performance syncs with an ensemble teetering at the edge of cartoonishness but never tumbling over, a balance owed to a writing team attuned to the cast’s chemistry and aware of the lines it shouldn’t cross.
It’s tough to pinpoint a standout in a group of killers this sharp, but Whitaker’s Alani, a kindhearted airhead, consistently delivers some of the show’s best asides and strangest beats. Hutcherson, meanwhile, is a straight-man revelation, his earnest, odd-man-out presence grounding the show’s otherwise manic energy. Jury’s still out on whether I Love LA effectively bottles the sensibility of its generation, but at the very least, its visual palette will stand as a time capsule for this peculiar moment in culture when Los Angeles teems with influencers chasing clout. The gang’s costuming is a running progression of world-building and sight gags: Tallulah’s loud, barely-there outfits mirror the hyperperformative ambition of the influencer world she inhabits, while Charlie’s elaborate, layered wardrobe underscores how each character plugs into a different version of the L.A. professional aspiration.
These dynamics animate the show’s set pieces: the scramble for brand deals, encounters with the bizarre fauna of L.A. celebrity, flirtations with the next echelon of fame and wealth. The energy of each episode stems from these pursuits, but at its core, I Love LA believes the fantasy that ambition and friendship might be enough to build a life in a city and professional world designed to break you. The series has a deep bench of accomplished EPs, including Lorene Scafaria, Max Silvestri, Emma Barrie, and Aida Rodgers; Barrie and Rodgers are Barry alums, and their influence seeps into the show’s deadpan Hollywood surreality, though I Love LA swaps Barry’s existential darkness for something more sparkly and hopeful. The result is a comedy that’s both precise and unhinged, absurdly funny yet emotionally true — a portrait of youthful ambition and friendship that makes someone slightly older both grateful to not be that young anymore and just a little envious of those who are.
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