Rachel Sennott, Odessa A'zion and Josh Hutcherson in I Love LA.HBO/Crave
It was always going to be hard for a Torontonian TV critic to fall for a series called I Love LA during this World Series.
But even viewers not currently locked into the Blue Jays’ intense battle for baseball supremacy with the Dodgers will have, at best, lukewarm feelings toward HBO’s latest, premiering Sunday.
The elevator pitch for I Love LA must have been a zillennial Girls crossed with Entourage for the creator economy.
Creator and star Rachel Sennott, herself an internet It girl extraordinaire, plays a talent manager charged with landing branding deals for the viral creatures of Instagram and TikTok.
Sennott, best known off socials for her collaborations with Canadian director Emma Seligman (Shiva Baby, Bottoms), tries to channel the energy of a Charli XCX video into a half-hour dramedy. The result, alas, is too often a Brat bummer.
Josh Hutcherson, left, plays Dylan, Maia’s boyfriend.HBO/Crave
Maia, Sennott’s character, is first glimpsed riding her normie boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson), in their Los Feliz apartment when an earthquake begins. He’s worried “the big one” is coming – but she refuses to get off of his manhood until she gets off.
This literal “did the earth move for you?” joke is followed by postsex scenes – a little nudity; a potty shot – that read as a more glam, less vulnerable version of the kind of oversharing that Lena Dunham pioneered more than a decade ago.
The bar has, simply, been raised for UTI punchlines in prestige-courting comedies (there’s a better one in Too Much, Dunham’s latest for Netflix) – and it’s not enough to have a celeb play a West Coast weirdo version of themselves in the age of Hacks and The Studio comic supremacy.
I Love LA is mostly structured as a friend-group comedy. Maia’s main pals are Charlie, a gay stylist to the stars played by Jordan Firstman with the sly comic delivery he also excels at in English Teacher; and Alani, the aimlessly rich daughter of a movie star played with nepo baby bona fides by True Whitaker, daughter of Forest (and with all the talent expected of such second-generation stars).
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The most original character is creator/influencer Tallulah (Odessa A’zion) – Maia’s NYU pal who ditched her as a collaborator and stayed in New York just as the pair were plotting a joint move to L.A. many years before.
Tallulah is blocked by Maia at start of the pilot, but the two are back as besties by the end of it and finally living together in the City of Angels. Their intermittently toxic friendship based around partying is now doubly problematized by the fact that the two have a working relationship with hundreds of thousands of dollars of branding deals at stake.
Maia’s struggles to rep Tallulah to the best of her abilities without letting her ambition or personal feelings interfere provide the arc to the first season.
But Tallulah ends up the true centre of the show, owing to A’zion’s ability to humanistically play a hot mess. The up-and-coming actor does a particularly award-worthy job in an episode where Tallulah has come under attack online: She channels all the panic, shame and terror of a near-cancellation while still finding comic notes within it.
Odessa A’zion, right, plays Maia’s friend and collaborator Tallulah.HBO/Crave
At its best, I Love LA allows for a glimpse into the Hollywood level of production behind some of those “casual” videos you scroll past online, while providing insight into the belittling barter economy and slippery ethics of being a professional influencer. (Tallulah has no problem pocketing $100,000 eating Ritz, but feels queasy when the company attempts to use her relationship with a woman to sell crackers to the queer community.)
But the overarching problem with I Love LA lies in its tonal inconsistency. Sennott and her writing team often go too far toward a stylized satirical place, similar to Search Party, only to scurry back toward dramedy for an emotional impact too late for it to land.
In short: It’s hard to tell whether Sennott’s characters are meant to be horrible people, or just the type of people who make jokes about being horrible to each other.
The attempt to include Los Angeles as a character doesn’t totally work either. Edgy fire jokes and references to Erewhon and the Bob Baker Marionette Theater aren’t enough to make the world feel properly lived in – and, indeed, as soon New York calls, everyone in the show is ready to split. It seems the show’s connection to LA is more of an situationship.
I Love LA premieres Nov. 2 at 10:30 p.m. and streams in Canada on Crave.