Even if you don't live in the area or nearby Los AngelesOur beautiful, sprawling city was hard to ignore this past weekend. Between the Dodgers' historic World Series victory over the Toronto Blue Jays, the subsequent volley of celebratory fireworks, and the subsequent Monday morning victory parade downtown, plus long-awaited premiere Rachel Sennottcomedy for twenty-somethings I love Los Angeles on HBO, it feels like Los Angeles is truly, without any irony, having a moment.
It's actually weird to admit this. When I think of pop culture admiring Los Angeles without irony, my thoughts go back to Old Hollywood and a little more recent film history. From Los Angeles Confidential To Mulholland Drive, La La Land, Pulp Fiction, Friday, Boogie NightsAnd Chinatown (among others) writers and filmmakers have worked for nearly a century to capture the city and its various neighborhoods and subcultures. But how rare is it to see a confluence of real-life events and a raucous Sunday night HBO show that gives Angelenos a genuine reason to celebrate themselves.
Unlike New York, our main big-city rival (and this writer's former home), Los Angeles is a city that's notoriously hard to love. Accusations of superficiality are becoming increasingly louder. The city is home to endless freeways, lousy public transportation, dry air and hard water, a quest for authority, a repressive health culture, and $20 status smoothies (which, unfortunately, are delicious). All these complaints have their place. Loving Los Angeles means doing the work. But if you look behind the curtain, you'll notice that Los Angeles is full of multiculturalism, world-class food at every price point, and entertainment for every interest imaginable. And while the near-perfect weather has become increasingly disastrous, even this harsh reality has provided an opportunity to see the city in a different light: The January fires that devastated Palisades and Altadena also brought the community together to fend for itself in an unprecedented way. The same can be said about Los Angeles residents resist ICE raids over the summer.
The key to loving Los Angeles is timing. As transplantologists like to tell newcomers, it takes two to three years to complete a transplant. Really know the city. Los Angeles includes so many distinct neighborhoods that there is no formal number. (Google estimates there are approximately 572, and Los Angeles TimesThe Mapping Los Angeles Project has identified more than 270, so make of that what you will.) It's a city so huge and exhausting to drive around that visiting friends who live in Santa Monica from Los Feliz is essentially a day trip. Pilot episode of the series I love Los Angeles perfectly captures the dynamics of distance; When a character visiting from New York suggests a last-minute trip to the beach (starting from Silver Lake on the east side), one friend in the group abruptly throws his hands up and flatly refuses.
Cast I love Los Angeles manifestation of team spirit. Clockwise from top left: Rachel Sennott, Odessa A'tzion, True Whitaker, Jordan Firstman and Josh Hutcherson.
HBO
Meanwhile, Sennot piece de resistance fervently declares his allegiance to Los Angeles with open arms and clenched teeth. I love Los Angeles is so specific to a young person's modern experience that it almost seems like something that would show up in my TikTok algorithm. I may be significantly older than Sennott's Millennial team by I love Los Angelesbut our East Side-adjacent lifestyle is eerily similar: cool walks along the Silver Lake Reservoir, birthday trips to Erewhon—more experiences than the grocery store, as her character's friend Charlie (Jordan Firstman) notes—and Courage bagels for brunch. If you can get past that infamous phrase, I guarantee you'll begin to question New York's dominant place in the nation's bagel monarchy.
In fact, we're starting to feel compared to our East Coast counterpart in many ways. If you were in town on any World Series night this year, you've seen some locals wearing Dodger blue somewhere. The excitement of winning back-to-back titles (a feat achieved by only a few teams in Major League history) was infectious: on Saturday, during Game 7, the building where I live was blown up by spectators. It's a very good time to be a sports fan: Los Angeles hasn't had an NFL franchise in two decades. Today we have two – the Rams and the Chargers – the only city other than New York with more than one NFL team.
The initial, mostly enthusiastic reaction to I love Los Angeles is most likely rooted in its absolute precision about what it is like for a certain subset of the city's population to exist and succeed here. (Before you come after me, yes, I am fully aware that the show's group of friends does not represent all twentysomethings living in Los Angeles, where there are many other industries besides entertainment and influence.) Much like its spiritual big brother. Girls, I love Los Angeles holds up a mirror to the absurdity of twenty years of life in a city where anything is possible—or so its characters are told. (For the record, Sennott said her biggest influence was the brutal 2000s HBO comedy. Entourage.)
However, most of the urban hangouts of young (almost) people usually take place in New York – Friends, Sex and the Cityabove Girls, Wide City, How I Met Your Mother. Issa Rae Unreliable I too followed this paradigm, but I would be inclined to categorize this show as one of what I like to call the “Sad LA Millennials” programs that became widespread in the 2010s (see also: You're the worst and Netflix Love). Unreliable It was absolutely a love letter to predominantly black South Los Angeles neighborhoods like Englewood, Baldwin Hills and West Adams, but its thirty-something characters collectively struggled to hold on to the hope they supposedly felt a decade ago about what life would be like as young adults and how they felt they were failing. Relatively, I love Los AngelesThe main characters are still young enough to be impatient and hungry even when life deals them blows.
I love Los Angeles unique in the twentysomething crowd simply because of its seriousness. In one episode of the pilot, two characters (an influencer and a Nepo kid played by Odessa A'tzion and True Whitaker, respectively) end up going on a long trip to the beach. Install on Randy Newman's 1983 classic “I Love L.A.” In the episode, A'tzion and Whitaker cruise down a sun-drenched highway, stop to browse vintage stores, and run along the beach as the sun begins to set. Even though Newman's lyrics are deliberately ambiguous about whether he truly loves Los Angeles, this idyllic montage from a show called I love Los Angeles the setup for the song of the same name seems quite sincere. And guess what? We love seeing this.
