Paula's explosive TikTok is the first big challenge in Maya and Tallulah's professional relationship.
Photo: Kenny Laubbacher/HBO
It's usually true that putting down your phone and going to touch some grass is an effective way to weather the internet storm. Unfortunately for Tallulah, it's also true that if you're even quasi-famous in Los Angeles, things aren't that simple.
Paula's harsh remarks on TikTok about Tallulah ugly whore the thief is the earthquake that shakes Tallulah and Maya to their core; “Girl” traces the ripple effect of the aftershocks. For Maya this is a decisive professional crisis. For Tallulah, it's a one-way ticket to the bottom of a paranoid spiral in which everyone in her new town is out to get her—and she's not entirely wrong. Unless you're close friends with Mimi Rush, mother of slash Zendaya, no deal with Trezemme will protect you from the flames of scandal. And if all your friends work in the industry and your favorite places are exclusively trendy Eastside cafes, then yes, you probably are surrounded by people who know exactly who you are and what you've done to become the top hero of the day.
Tallulah also learns about the video while hooked up to Alani's home IV vitamin IV, a luxury that quickly becomes body horror when she rips out the IV in a panic and starts dripping blood all over the (gorgeous) floor. By the time Maya gets there, her friend/client is turning the place inside out in search of a spare vape, to which Maya quickly responds in a soothing voice, as if handing her precious little finger to a toddler. Meanwhile, Alani is high as hell, nobly accepting the comfort food that Tallulah refused. Once again, Odessa A'tzion and True Whitaker deliver their comedic beats without breaking a sweat.
Alani ends up putting Tallulah's phone in a vase to keep her from snapping back at Paula's comments with an ironclad defense of herself, like, “Why don't you suck my fucking dick from behind?” Whatever works! (Greetings At Home with Amy Sedaris director Bill Benz for giving this entire episode—and especially this scene—such palpably frenetic energy.)
The temperature in the room continues to rise as Charlie bursts in to share his personal disaster: it looks like All The gays of Los Angeles have heard that Mimi fired him, and so they won't let him cut the coffee line. (If you're looking I love Los Angeles if the stakes are higher than that, I'm going to suggest you watch another show.) Clearly, Charlie's solution to this unwanted social distancing is to use Tallulah's distracting dinner as his own reputation among L.A.'s gay service workers. Assuming their waiter belongs to this demo, he fawns over him with flattery, excessive orders, and comically huge tips. Unfortunately, the waiter's reaction is to brag about how happy he is with his generosity. wifethus leaving Charlie at the end of his rope. This isn't the first time his storyline plays out in an episode so separate from the rest of the characters that none of them seem to internalize a word he says, and I suspect it won't be the last time.
Meanwhile, Maya gets to work, fully expecting Alyssa to be in a state of crisis over Tallulah, jeopardizing their business interests. Instead, her boss was very calm and less interested in the sordid details of this scandal. Instead, she and a calm consultant (Josh Brener) instruct Maya to carry out basic apology protocol in a relatively low-pressure “white-on-white bullying” situation, namely: “many It’s easier to come back.” (Even Leighton Meester, stuck behind a desk for most of her scenes, is still excited about it.)
Maya, defending her friend and angered by Paula's hypocrisy, can't imagine her trying to get Tallulah to apologize in a ChatGPT corporate speech. She spends the rest of the episode wrestling with her gut feeling that this is the wrong move, but it's an encounter with an aggressively anti-woke Silver Lake mom at Dylan's school fundraiser that helps her make up her mind. If even a ten-year-old child thinks that retreating because cookie this is a weakness, of course it is unacceptable for Tallulah to do the same here I think…? “Girl” contains several threads of darkly funny commentary about how anyone can turn #girlboss culture and “being a girl” into something much more sinister. Some of them, like Alyssa's jaded crisis management and Paula's faux-feminist reasons for ratting out Tallulah, land. But Maya's lightbulb moment, coming from a mom praising her daughter for “not reinforcing beta habits,” doesn't quite add up.
Moreover, it doesn't even become necessary when Alani recognizes Paulena as “Paulena Grace Rikers” (yes, What Rikers), thereby giving Maya a reason to let Tallulah off Alyssa's leash180. This revelation of the family's past war crimes gives Tallulah all she needs to destroy Paula's virtuous online image. Encouraged, she does so in a scathing video response that will admittedly lose her a deal with Tresemme, but could instead land her an arguably much more prestigious partnership with Balenciaga. If Maya ends this season as a full-fledged PR monster, then finding kinship with that toxic mom who led to such success will be the very moment that made it possible.
• Tallulah's nerves over a hot chef who slid into her DMs become extremely understandable when it's revealed that she's a butch Moses Ingram, because hot. It's a shame that Tallulah couldn't relax enough to have sex with her in the warehouse, but judging by her (also very hot!) by sharing her number in a jar of rice for Tallulah's drowned phone, this can't be the last we see of her.
• Congratulations to Dylan, whose director's response to a meme about his employee drinking copious amounts of cocaine is not “you're fired” but “can you get some for my friends?” Doesn't exactly solve the problem of this photo living on the internet forever, but it's handy in the short term anyway.
• “If Talullah gets a reputation for being 'totally unsafe,' I'm done. What's she going to do, write a book?”
• “It's like my dad saying, 'We won't let another accusation ruin Christmas.'
• “She just broke my phone. What am I supposed to be looking at?!?”
