Summary
I Love LA has surprising standouts in “Roger & Munchy”, namely Dylan and Charlie, with the Gen Z caricatures giving way to a richer vein of subtext.
The best joke in I Love LA is that the funniest character isn’t any of the Gen Z influencer caricatures that Rachel Sennott has clearly created the show to mock. Instead, it’s Dylan, played by an absurdly well-cast Josh Hutcherson as a meek quasi-intellectual who is constantly confounded by everything going on around him. As predicted in the premiere, Maia deciding to play queenmaking manager to her off-the-rails best friend, Tallulah, is already creating a host of new problems for the two of them to navigate in Episode 2, “Roger & Munchy”, but the audience surrogate here is Dylan. In walking in on Tallulah having noisy cross-country phone sex, cooking a slap-up meal last-minute for a potentially litigious jewellery designer, and trying to figure out which of his girlfriend’s manic outbursts are real or performative, he is standing in for all of us.
This episode also introduces a potential villain – I assume one of several to come – in the form of Paulena, Tallulah’s New York frenemy, who happens to spot her in a coffee shop brainstorm with Maia and immediately loses it over an apparently stolen Balenciaga bag. Tallulah starts to frantically worry about Paulena pressing charges, and thus Maia begins to worry about whether Tallulah will be able to work in L.A. with a warrant out for her arrest in New York. According to her father, who’s a lawyer, she’ll be fine, but that’s only if Tallulah isn’t extradited, a concept that Maia has to have explained to her more than once.
Tallulah’s solution to all this is classic sitcom nonsense. She calls Paulena and tells her that she only stole her bag because she was addicted to Ketamine, and now she’s sober, she wants to apologise by inviting Paulena over for dinner. But she also grossly downplays how insane and vindictive Paulena is, so immediately after arriving, she unearths a baggie full of Class-As – remember, she believes that Tallulah is in recovery at this point – and then starts unsubtly threatening Dylan, who’s a teacher, with reporting his drug use to the school principal if he doesn’t keep snorting lines. Sennott’s smart here in threading this idea of harmless caricature with a vein of genuine sociopathy, the implication being that you can’t quite have viral social media success without being at least a little bit bonkers.
This idea is reinforced when the only way that Maia and Tallulah can get away with it is by acting crazier than Paulena, building up an elaborate ruse of Maia being a vengeful psychopath and planting the seed that if she kills herself, Dylan, or Tallulah, all of which seem increasingly likely, Paulena will be implicated because she brought the drugs. Sennott’s really good here, playing in a big, deranged mode, but again it’s Dylan who adds the most value, because he has no idea what the plan is and is just reacting in real time to what looks like an impromptu mental breakdown. Honestly, Hutcherson is so good in this.
While this seems like a win, though, Paulena decides to charitably leave her Balenciaga bag as a gift for Tallulah, but when she returns to the door, she overhears the others laughing and joking about how they conned her and will never have to see her or her tacky jewellery ever again. She responds by immediately going live and “outing” Tallulah to her followers, potentially sinking her L.A. career before it has even gotten going.
True Whitaker in I Love LA | Image via WarnerMedia
I Love LA Episode 2 also makes time for Charlie and Alani in a couple of work-related subplots, one of which is mostly just funny, while the other underscores a thematic point. Charlie has the funny one. He’s working as a stylist for a musician named Mimi (played by a guest-starring Ayo Edebiri), whom he overhears wants Zendaya to play her mother in a music video. Charlie immediately recognises this is an absolutely ridiculous idea, but rather than just letting it go, he tries to say what he believes Mimi wants to hear by characterising Zendaya as a monster. When Mimi asks him to cite his sources, though, he has to try and dig up legitimate dirt, which proves impossible and eventually backfires.
This is the funniest part of “Roger & Munchy”, for me. Everything Charlie says is funny – “Gay. Clothes. End of person,” is his response to Mimi’s accusation that he only knows about fashion and being gay – but it’s also just amusing in general that his only real interest in keeping Mimi sweet is so that he can style himself in her cast-off clothing. But he’s forced to strip all that clothing off when it turns out that Zendaya did agree to star in the music video, and word gets back to Mimi that her stylist was trying to sabotage her relationship with what she now perceives to be her best friend. Charlie, now fired and suddenly less glamorous, is left in his underwear pining for the booty call he had only a couple of scenes prior considered himself too aloof and important to treat with any real dignity. Lesson learned.
Alani, meanwhile, waltzes into her father’s production office, where she has a decorative title of “VP of Creative Projects”, and finds herself sitting in on a meeting that doubles as a surprisingly haunting backstory, with her being totally oblivious to the horrors of her own insulated past. A lot of this is funny too, but it’s also making the point that Alani, an airhead Gen Z nepo baby, is in many ways the kind of Angeleno that Maia and Tallulah are trying to emulate. The fact that she doesn’t even recognise her own exploitation lets some of the air out of the fantasy that Maia and Tallulah are chasing. Not that they’d notice, obviously.
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