“If we’re gonna die, I just wanna come.”
I Love LA’s main messy protagonist, Maia, played by the ever-charming. Still, also ever-chaotic Rachel Sennott, lets this banger of a one-liner loose as she rides her baby-faced boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson). At the same time, a major earthquake shakes their bed, apartment, and the vapid world of Los Angeles around them.
Welcome to the mayhem that is the HBO Max series I Love LA, created, written by, and starring Sennott herself. In this show, you will find the messiness that either currently haunts, once haunted, or shall haunt those nebulous years that are (or were, or will be) your mid-20s. Things kick off on Maia’s 27th birthday, a day when any wrong step can send her into a major crashout (her boyfriend almost accidentally calls her old — big mistake!) and when she can’t help but feel like her life is going nowhere.
Her ex-best friend Tallulah (Odessa A’zion) looks like she’s killing it in New York as an It Girl (read as influencer), her boss Alyssa (Leighton Meester) refuses to give her a promotion, and her friends, nepo baby Alani (True Whitaker) and the self-absorbed Charlie (Jordan Firstman), do little to sway her in the right direction. Because Maia suffers from the same problem that afflicts most people in their 20s: the inability to see the way forward. And L.A., despite all the glitter and magic it promises, has proven to be, at least for Maia, an isolating, unforgiving, and gridlocked town where big dreams go to die.
Viewers may be tempted to steer away from I Love LA, especially because at first glance it seems to be a show overly obsessed with the chaotic inner workings of the City of Angels. But if we take away the reverence with which all of the show’s main characters seem to offer L.A., we find the more universal story of a young-ish person trying to figure themselves out before other people do it first. Maia, for all her bitching and moaning about Tallulah’s online success (which, she claims, she helped kickstart), envies her ex-bestie’s poise, power, and ability to get anything she wants with the mere shimmying of her tube top and the flicking of her gorgeous head of hair. Her feelings of inadequacy are all the more amplified when Tallulah comes a-knocking on her door, eager to get Maia shitfaced, hungover, and all the more stressed out about where her life in L.A. is going.
The first episode of I Love LA is currently streaming on HBO Max. New episodes will be released weekly every Sunday.
