I Love LA

By the end of its 8-episode first season, I Love LA has immersed you in a world you both want to live in and stay far away from in the best way possible. All of Sennott's honed comedy and drama chops come together magnificently to carry a series that is hopefully just getting started.

The warm, relatable territory where the first season ends up doesn’t fully square with the savage satire promised by the pilot. But the combination of empathy and acrimony is endearing in its own right, making it difficult not to be won over by a tightknit crew out to get theirs before the world comes crashing down on top of them.

Maia and Tallulah’s relationship gives the show a buoyant us-against-the-world energy, a sense of shared delusion and drive that powers both its comedy and its ache.

It helps, of course, that the performances are natural and fast-paced, clearly taking Sennott’s acerbic, deceptively nuanced lead. These are smart portrayals of dumb characters.

It never dawdles or feels bloated; the eight 30-minute episodes are crisp and tight, two adjectives that too rarely apply to TV these days. It goes down like a spicy Gen Z comedic statement.

With her [Rachel Sennott's] deadpan humor and penchant for embodying messy young women who are their own worst enemies, she’s concocted a fitting love letter to this aggressively sunny city.

That I find some of these people more trying than charming doesn’t prevent “I Love L.A.” from being a show I actually quite like. (The ratio of charm to annoyance may be flipped for some viewers, of course; different strokes, as we used to say back in the 1900s.) If anything, it’s a testament to Sennott and company having done their jobs well; the production is tight, the dialogue crisp, the photography rich — nothing here seems the least bit accidental.

I Love LA isn’t a bad show, but it’s not a great show, either (at least not yet). Shows like The Bear and Insecure and Somebody Somewhere make it look easy to seamlessly blend hilarity and humanity to reflect the messiness of real life. But I Love LA highlights how hard it is to pull off that balance.

You’re going to need some patience with I Love LA in order to enjoy it. Like most comedies about found family, there’s too much jokey chatter and not enough actual character depth to help viewers latch onto the situations of Maia or anyone else. But the friendship between Maia and Tallulah tells us that there may be more underneath the vocal fry.

I Love LA leads with its characters’ most aggravating characteristics. .... But the writing gets sharper and more distinct over the course of the season. .... Even after a full eight-episode season, it still struggles to define its other characters as well as it does Maia and Tallulah. But there’s something electric in that dyad.

This eight-episode season, while a worthy exploration of social-media-fueled hustle culture, isn't substantial enough to warrant another.

The HBO comedy bursts out the gate with the look-at-me dazzle of a star in waiting; much like an actual Angeleno, it’s got surprising depths waiting to be discovered. It’s just that to get there, you have to sit through a string of fitfully charming, frequently exhausting misadventures first.

It’s fun enough to let “I Love LA” tumble along in Maia and Tallulah’s wake, enjoying some laugh-out-loud moments, its nuanced explicitness about sexual power dynamics, and Sennott’s general presence. But as the show goes on, its quarterlife ennui seems increasingly like something the show’s creators are trying to outrun with soapier turns, rather than a thematic concern.

There’s turbulence – it takes several episodes for Maia to downshift from sketch trope to character, an initial barrier to entry for a promising series that rewards patience.

Rachel Sennott's "I Love LA" feels like a mash-up of earlier HBO comedies about young people, but it never quite finds a voice of its own.

It revels in the hijinks of the shallow and the untalented, in the process squandering the gifts of its own cast.

Early on, Maia discusses Tallulah’s need to diversify and leverage ephemeral social-media fame into something more sustainable. But in its own hyperactive attempts to showcase a broad comic range, I Love LA never truly excels at anything.

Sennott has a keen eye for the absurd workings of the influencer world, not to mention some great jokes about it. But her engagement with this new form of celebrity is so superficial for most of the 8-episode season that it’s hard to tell whether the show is meant as a commentary on shallowness or if it’s just shallow.

Other than serving as a showcase for creator-star Rachel Sennott, the show feels about as generic as its title.

The underdevelopment of the Tallulah-Maia relationship becomes the series’ Achilles heel; we’re never made to understand exactly why the two drifted apart, or how the manager-client dynamic affects a status quo we don’t grasp in the first place. .... What “I Love L.A.” pursues with far more intensity than humor is a cool factor, at times mirroring Maia and company’s desperate scheming for the same.