Summary
I’m not the target demo for Rachel Sennott’s I Love LA, but if “Block Her” is anything to go by, it works well enough as a comedy to appeal to just about anyone.
It is highly probable that I am so far removed from the target demographic of an HBO comedy about single twenty-something Californian girls – and guys! – trying to make it in L.A., that any opinion I may or may not have on the subject is utterly worthless. Then again, that’s probably true of my opinions on most things. But with I Love LA, especially, I feel notably removed from what Rachel Sennott and pilot director Lorene Scafaria are trying to do in Episode 1, “Block Her”, which is weird since I really rather enjoyed it either way.
But I do like Sennott, to be fair, and her perspective roots this premiere in a vision of L.A. that is half admiring and half deeply critical. It’s full of beautiful people and glitz and glamour and nice food, weather, and parties, but it’s also a determinedly vacuous culture of put-on vocal fry and embellished personal achievements. Sennott’s playing Maia, who wakes up on the morning of her 27th birthday to discover that she has been passed over for a promotion at work, her former best friend is doing a lot better than she is, and an earthquake might interrupt her final orgasm. On the level of everything going wrong and life feeling as if it over-promised and under-delivered, I can, at least, relate.
Maia’s boyfriend, Dylan, is unflinchingly supportive, as are her L.A. friends, Charlie and Alani, who both give a simple bit of advice to help Maia deal with the fact that her New York bestie, Tallulah, apparently dumped her for a bigger-name manager: Block her. It’s the simple catch-all solution that works for everything, or at least it does until Maia gets home from being overlooked by her boss, Alyssa (Leighton Meester, hopefully with more screen time than she had in The Buccaneers), to find Tallulah waiting to surprise her. She didn’t forget Maia’s birthday after all! And now she’s in L.A. to make Maia’s birthday all about her.
This is how Maia perceives it, anyway, but she’s nursing a lot of resentment for Tallulah since they were supposed to move to L.A. together, with Maia managing her influencer career, but that has taken off independently, and Maia feels as if Tallulah is just capitalising on all the hard work she did turning her party-hard lifestyle into a brand. But as soon as we meet Tallulah, a whirlwind of charisma and energy who looks great in everything and seems able to charm everyone she meets, it’s obvious that she probably didn’t need as much help being popular as Maia is taking credit for.
This is the uncertain space where I Love LA lives in Episode 1. On some level, Tallulah is the person Maia thought she’d be when she came to L.A., and she assumes every overture Tallulah makes is calculated, even though Tallulah’s adamant she’s sincere. It seems very much like Tallulah has become the scapegoat for Maia’s own lack of success, but since we’ve only just met both of them, it’s impossible to really tell. Maia plays killjoy for every increasingly elaborate gesture Tallulah makes, starting with getting them into a nightclub by magically meeting and charming the owner outside and ending with replacing Maia’s dinner reservation with a surprise party in a hotel suite.
This eventually proves too much for Maia, and she storms off. Tallulah follows, and for the first time, both are totally open and honest with each other. Maia didn’t get that promotion, and seeing Tallulah is a reminder of how badly her life panned out. But Tallulah isn’t as successful as she looks – she’s broke, and her rich boyfriend left her. This bad news is nonetheless reassuring for Maia, who is finally able to look at Tallulah as her best friend again and not just the immaculately styled manifestation of all her personal failures. They’re back.
And thus we come to the hook of the show, which is that Tallulah decides she’s going to stay in L.A. with Maia as her manager, as they’d originally planned. This seems like a good idea at the time, but considering there are seven more episodes to go, it’s obviously going to turn out to be a bad one.
RELATED:
