On Sunday's season finale of I Love L.A., Los Angeles is accused of coming between the show's main character Maya (Rachel Sennott) and her boyfriend Dylan (Josh Hutcherson). After their relationship falls apart, Maya, an aspiring talent manager, elops to New York with her only client Tallulah (Odessa A'tzion), a party girl turned influencer, so the couple can attend a fancy dinner that will boost Tallulah's profile. Maya and Dylan take a break, which gives her the opportunity to find a position at a major agency by contacting her old boss. These seem like irreconcilable differences, but her most emotionally perceptive friend, Charlie (Jordan Furstman), is still trying to play the role of couples therapist, assuring Dylan that everything around them is to blame. “This city,” he says, “made Maya “bad and cruel.”
Sennott's I Love Los Angeles is a transplant of its titular city. (Sennott herself moved to Los Angeles during the pandemic.) The setting is far from the only element that feels underdeveloped: The inner lives of the characters, nearly all of whom spend their waking hours working image-making jobs, are suggested rather than seen. The new HBO series pales in comparison to predecessors like “Sex and the City” and “Girls,” which also chronicle the urban misadventures of privileged, self-absorbed women (and gay men). But “I Love L.A.” is undeniably fascinating as a portrait of millennia of brain rot—in this case, the product of their participation in the creator economy and attention. In her first scene with Charlie and another friend, Alani (True Whitaker), Maya berates Tallulah—at this point still a nemesis—for continuing to post photos of a model from advertising campaign that lasted several months, and debates whether to continue turning it off or blocking it entirely. Equally confused is Charlie, the celebrity stylist who wears T-shirts that quote viral TikToks. Both are tired of their phone addictions, scrolling while getting dressed or immediately after sex. To paraphrase a well-known truth of Sex and the City, the fifth character is not Los Angeles, but the Internet.
The vagaries of online life define the show's structure and contribute to the seeming lack of stakes. The ensemble tackles new problems with surprising creativity; the problems themselves are completely meaningless. In the third episode—the first standout performance of the season—a rival influencer named Paulena posts a video airing Tallulah's dirty laundry, sending Maya into crisis mode. (Tallulah is accused of being a “criminal” and, worse, a “kinkshamer.”) Maya's millennial boss, Alyssa (Leighton Meester), hands her a plan to get out of the scandal, including a stilted, corporate-approved apology. Maya, sensing that Tallulah's followers will be put off by the inauthenticity, advises her to take a more 2025 approach, attacking Paulena as a fake with generations of ill-gotten wealth. The crowd attacks Paulena and the viral disaster subsides; as Alani says about the Internet: “It is dangerous, but fair, like the ocean.”
The thought that everything must pass is both a comfort and a threat. Sennott and Firstman were both internet comedians before moving to television, and their fluency in that world helps sharpen the satire. Meeting a more established influencer—real-life TikToker Quen Blackwell, playing a version of herself as she's done since posting her first Vine at age fourteen—shows just how dangerous it is to stake your livelihood on such volatile territory. Setting out on a soulless, data-driven collaboration, Tallulah stumbles upon Quen's “click farm,” a wall of a hundred-plus smartphones playing videos on loop to get attention. Enveloped in the blue glow of the screens, Quen tells her with complete confidence, “If you stop for even a second, you’ll fucking disappear.”
“I Love L.A.” explores this anxiety in a funny way and subtly humanizes it as the season progresses. A show about becoming an adult: Maya, who turns twenty-seven in the first episode, must find something of a work-life balance, while the self-protectively cynical Charlie gradually accepts that it's okay to be honest, even if you're an urban gay man. But in the new media economy, milestones are less defined and harder to achieve than in the SATC days. Carrie Bradshaw's observations and puns may have been cringeworthy, but we as viewers didn't have to wonder how she could find fulfillment in her writing. A generation later, Hannah Horvath was vying for purchase in the same, much-shrinking industry, earning two hundred dollars for a confessional blog post about, say, her first crack at cocaine. The career paths offered at I Love L.A. are even more challenging. Alyssa, despite all her talk about supporting her female colleagues, has no intention of promoting Maya and even actively humiliates her. At first, Maya offers Tallulah a three-year plan to transform her into a health person, but neither of them is particularly interested in sponsorships with so-called “blue chip” brands like Ritz crackers. When they finally do to make Tallulah a model for the Ritz in exchange for a hundred thousand dollar salary, the mural the brand painted on a Los Angeles street corner is so embarrassing that she destroys it herself. But it's unclear how far the “It Girl,” best known for stealing a Balenciaga bag, can go.
