I Love LA review – Rachel Sinnott’s HBO comedy finds its way but takes its time | television

FFor most of its public existence, I Love Los Angeles, the new HBO comedy series created by Rachel Sennott, was known online as the Untitled Rachel Sennott Project. One wonders if they should have kept the temporary title, which suits the show better than its actual title; Although I Love LA goes to Erewhon, it’s neither a love letter to the city, nor a portrait of its precarious creative class, so much as a glossy, prestige brand bet on Sennott, an Internet girl with a clear modern distinction between actor and celebrity, and the very popular and anarchic online sensibility she embodies.

The project’s logic trickled down: Sinnott, one of the few Internet-raised comedians with real cinematic skill (see: Shiva Baby, I Used To Be Funny and Bottoms), in eight full episodes; HBO, consistently losing younger viewers to YouTube, makes it very attractive to online millennials; The gossip class, which has been hungry for a really good young adult comedy — FX’s Adults , released earlier this year, didn’t cut it — is eager for a successor to the messy, self-absorbed, utterly absorbing women of Sex and the City, Girls and Insecure. Everyone can agree: Nothing gets people talking like a confident, crazy-sexy woman on TV.

Maya Sinnott certainly fits the bill, being both compelling and insufferable at the same time. We meet her on her 27th birthday in girls’ fashion — while having unremarkable sex with her boyfriend — with a West Coast twist (she’s so focused on her own laser pleasure that she happily ignores the earthquake. And it’s also 7 a.m.). An aspiring talent manager living in Los Feliz, she’s a definite cenote of contradictions, for better and worse—at once hyper-self-conscious and delusional, zany but dead-eyed, and overtly sexual but girlish. She stretches out her vowels like candy, sings the end of each sentence out loud, and exaggerates gestures as if she were constantly in front of the front-facing camera.

At her best—usually, in vignettes or scene-stealing deliveries—Sennott’s oscillating balance between clownish self-deprecation and cool-girl violence is exquisite; I can watch an 18-second clip on LATV, where she spins around like a disturbed siren – “Don’t you have an eating disorder? Get one, bitch!” – In an endless loop. Maya is a more controversial creation, whose catatonic anger blurs the line between provocative annoyance and disgust; Like Meg Stalter, another Internet-bred comedian who recently landed a star in Lena Dunham’s middling TV series “Too Much,” Sinnott is trying a trick designed for quick hits and attention deficits on the Internet with episode-long television. There’s disruption — it takes several episodes for Maia to move from trope to character, an initial barrier to entry in a promising series that rewards patience.

Like Sinnott, Maya and her friends graduated from New York University and settled in Los Angeles as part of the city’s upwardly mobile creative class. Charlie (Jordan Firstman) is a popular fashion designer in WeHo’s harshly judgmental gay scene, with a preternaturally sarcastic knack for social climbing belied by an inner longing for connection. Alani (True Whittaker, Forrest’s daughter), is a well-meaning but clueless kid with a makeup job at her father’s production company and an unlimited line of credit, Dionne to Maia’s Cher.

Then there’s Maya’s ex-best friend Tallulah (Odyssey star Azion), a New York Instagram villain — whose Kardashian-style splits are made even more serious by the episode — who re-enters Maya’s life and the series, like a comet. Tallulah has a husky voice, is dangerously beautiful, and full of energy I don’t say anything Star quality. (So ​​does A’Zion, who’s already gained buzz for her starring role opposite Timothée Chalamet in the upcoming Marty Supreme film.) Maya, of course, becomes her manager.

The oeuvre of internet celebrities, and the navel-gazing world of Hollywood, is a difficult mix to view – the dynamics of social media, niche, turbo-charged, and generally uninteresting to those outside of it, are very difficult to portray on screen. It takes a while for I Love LA to find its footing. The earlier episodes have a mechanical quality, a collection of punchlines (“Reputation died in 2017”), Los Angeles references (“Courage Bagels”) and millennial standards: Paris Hilton stars in Blindness, a Hannah Montana movie, the casting of Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester as Maya’s boss (girl), and Josh Hutcherson, of Bridge to Terabithia and The Hunger Games fame, as her. Normie’s sweet boyfriend Dylan. (As expected, Hutcherson makes him likable.) Apparently loving Los Angeles means taking on a lot of threat.

But the attractions are there, and so are the visuals – it’s refreshing to see a comedy pilot given director Lorene Scafaria’s skillful and emotional handling. (Subsequent directors, including Sinnott, Bill Benz, and Kevin Bray, maintain the aesthetic we live in.) Midway through the season, I found my usually stern caution against influencers—fascinated by Charlie’s unlikely connections, pained by Tallulah’s failures, and frustrated by Maya’s astonishing absorption but rooting for her nonetheless. We are tickled by the show’s sharp ironies and heightened image of this rung on the fame ladder, and long for another chapter. The endless embarrassments and limitless opportunities of celebrity can seem, by the end of the season, not much different from life, especially in your 20s. It’s a bumpy ride, but they’re just getting started.

• I Love LA premieres on HBO in the US on November 2, on HBO Max in Australia on November 3, and on Sky Comedy in the UK on November 5.