Every generation gets its hangout shows, from Cheers to Friends to How I Met Your Mother. But there was a notable void for Gen Z — until the arrival last month of I Love LA. Created, written by, and co-starring Rachel Sennott, the HBO series follows four late-twentysomethings making their way in the titular city today, working (sort of), partying, fucking up, and just plain fucking. The two with real jobs work as a talent agent and a celebrity stylist. The other two are an influencer whose life has imploded and a professional nepo baby. People speak in astrology and use the word “cunt” as an adjective. They vape and do a lot of coke and ketamine and a lot of squealing. And if that all sounds kind of unpleasant, perhaps that’s partly the point. I Love LA may not be for everyone — what art is? — but it’s so lived-in and so sharp, it feels like an adrenaline jab to the heart of a post-Peak TV landscape that’s been littered with shows lacking a point of view.
Sennott, 30, came up in the NYU comedy scene alongside Ayo Edebiri, broke out as the star of 2020’s Shiva Baby, and brought her outré humor as a co-writer and star of the horny teen-sex comedy Bottoms. But I Love LA leaps out as a statement from, yes, a voice of a generation. Like Girls, this is a show that knows its characters are ridiculous and naive and self-absorbed — and it both celebrates and gently mocks them for it. The perspective is one born of empathy. As Sennott told Deadline, ”I wanted us to not take ourselves too seriously.” But, she added, citing Covid, the job market, our polarized political climate, and the prison of social media, the world young adults have been thrust into has not exactly been welcoming: “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.”
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Not surprisingly, as with Girls, online discourse around I Love LA has been polarized and often snarky. (Sennott has said that she modeled the show more on Entourage, actually, though that fact likely won’t deter snarksters.) Some call the characters vapid (see: Entourage). Some call them annoying (see: Girls or Entourage). A predictable segment of grinches rail about how the show does not reflect their L.A. (see: city of 4 million people and roughly 500 square miles). But maybe it doesn’t have to be all that deep. At its core I Love LA is a chance to spend time with a cast of characters — and actors — curated according to Sennott’s taste. Which is to say, a group of rising stars who individually and collectively capture something ineffable about right now.
Odessa A’zion (daughter of actor and Better Things creator Pamela Adlon) is electric as the influencer Tallulah, a narcissistic chaos agent who nevertheless shows flashes of tenderness and heart. Jordan Firstman, who first broke out doing high-concept impressions on Instagram during the pandemic, brings the perfect balance of vanity and insecurity to stylist Charlie. True Whitaker, daughter of Forest, embraces the meta irony of playing the intellectually vacant Alani, given a no-show job with a fancy title at her Oscar-winning dad’s production company. Gen Z everyguy Josh Hutcherson is the perfect straight man amid it all as Dylan, sweet schoolteacher boyfriend to Sennott’s neurotic aspiring talent rep Maia.
As any great coach would, Sennott assembled a team of talented players and put them in the best position to succeed. They feel like actual friends who actually live in the city they’re depicting, who’ve actually experienced the ups and downs of a late-twenties life where you’re not where you want to be and not even sure why you wanted to be there in the first place. The specifics of I Love LA might not be yours. But the story belongs to all of us.
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