‘I Love LA’ Season 1 Review: Can’t Find A Footing

I Love LA follows the trend of HBO shows focusing on flawed characters in their late 20s/early 30s, exploring their lives in either the Big Apple or the City of Angels. First came Sex and the City in New York, then Entourage in Los Angeles, then Girls in New York. Ever since the latter ended in 2017, HBO hasn’t had a show to continue that trend until now.

For better or worse, I Love LA is what you would expect if someone were trying to make a show like those. The issue, however, is that I Love LA is trying so hard to emulate some of those that it never creates an identity of its own.

I Love LA follows Maia (Rachel Sennott), an assistant associate manager who is trying to get a promotion to be a junior manager at Alyssa 180. She cites an influencer she used to manage in New York, Talulah (Odessa A’Zion), who also happens to be her former best friend, to prove she has enough experience for the role. Separately but surprisingly, Talulah shows up at Maia’s apartment in Los Angeles, shaking up her world both professionally and personally. The show also follows Maia’s boyfriend Dylan (Josh Hutcherson) and her friends Alani (True Whitaker) and Charlie (Jordan Firstman).

It’s not just that I Love LA has nothing new to say—it feels like it has nothing to say at all. It’s a show that tries to do so many things and emulate so many other shows that it never quite creates a voice of its own. It never finds the footing it so desperately needs.

Shows like Sex and the City, Girls, and Entourage are primarily hangout shows where the audience is there for the characters and their relationships with each other and the world around them. They’re all deeply flawed characters, but the magic is that they have enough dimensions to make them work.

The characters in I Love LA struggle to feel real whatsoever. They feel like caricatures that are attempting to critique the very thing they portray. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some satire that may point you in the direction of it being that type of show, but it rarely ever feels like it. The show is in a weird balance of almost never being a full satire but almost never being sincere with its characters.

A major part of that is that we never truly delve into these characters in a meaningful way. Maia’s career is a focus, but we rarely see her actually manage Talulah’s career. We barely know what Talulah even does on her social media or anything beyond the fact that she’s an influencer. Alani feels like an afterthought in almost every episode. Charlie actually gets some interesting stuff to do, but it’s undercut by storylines that just don’t work in the slightest—one of them being Ayo Edebiri in a terrible British accent, having her immense talent wasted on what appears to be a nonsensical bit. Josh Hutcherson’s Dylan’s only role is to ground the show, which he does at times but the characters outside of him are far too absurd for him to work as well as he could.

The world around them just isn’t built up well enough because of this. Sure there are elements of LA, but it doesn’t feel ingrained into the show. Rather, it feels like a show contained in a bubble that doesn’t feel like it exists. For satires that are meant to portray some level of realism to work as intended, either the setting or the characters have to be grounded on some level to be great. This just doesn’t have either of those things.

The characters Rachel Sennott created for this show simply aren’t interesting enough to make this show run like a well-oiled machine. The machine in this case is more akin to the ice cream machine at your local McDonald’s—it doesn’t work most of the time, but even when it does, and even when you get the best McFlurry they make, it’s still a sundae from a fast food establishment.

Perhaps the biggest thing for me personally is just that the comedy doesn’t work. I completely understand why it may work for a lot of people, but the show never quite hits the mark for me on that end. Most of the comedy falls flat. With a comedy, there are a million forgivable sins contingent on the comedy being good to great, but I Love LA is a middling bag on that end at best.

Despite all this I do believe the show has some level of potential. It’s a show that needs to find its niche, and sometimes it’s very hard to do in the first season. There are a lot of shows that are able to find that groove in a second season, which I hope is the case. There are some bits and moments where the show where it’s firing on enough cylinders to create something that works but it just needs to continue that momentum for an entire season. Luckily for fans of the show and even those that aren’t quite there yet, it has been renewed for a second season, so maybe it can find its voice there.

I Love LA Season 1 stars Rachel Sennott, Odessa A’zion, True Whitaker, Jordan Firstman, Moses Ingram, and Josh Hutcherson, with Elijah Wood and Ayo Edebiri guest starring. The show airs on HBO.

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