Summary
I Love LA gets even more ridiculous than usual in “Upstairses”, but a fun Elijah Wood cameo and some depth beneath the surface help things out.
Networking is a deliberately nebulous word, one typically used as an excuse for getting drunk with people whose company you stand to benefit from in one way or another. In a contemporary influencer-driven climate, networking means making videos. Right now. It’s transactional, the kind of thing you indulge in at parties where people are introduced alongside their social media follower counts. There is no better setting for this kind of nonsense than the Hollywood Hills, and Episode 4 of I Love LA knows it.
As bold a claim as this might seem, given how ridiculous some of the outbursts have already been, “Upstairses” is the most exaggerated the show has been. It makes a party full of celebrities feel like a hellscape, and has a surprisingly game Elijah Wood cameoing as a mockery of himself to make the point that influencers haven’t just taken over popular culture, but in his case, literally his home.
That’s the hook here, Maia, Charlie, Alani, and particularly Tallulah have been invited to a party being thrown by Quen Blackwell in Elijah Wood’s expansive L.A. home. Initially, I thought the namedrop was just for fun, since Blackwell is much more the kind of guest star to be at home in a comedy like this, but in a ridiculous set of circumstances, Elijah Wood is indeed present, albeit watching cartoons alone in his bedroom.
Things are going well enough for Tallulah following her takedown of Paulena that she suspects she and Quen might end up becoming best friends overnight, not realising – or perhaps not wanting to reckon with – Quen’s self-serving agenda. She has simply spotted an opportunity, which is the only way the influencer brain seems to be able to process information. Now, granted, Tallulah isn’t expecting her “friendship” with Quen to go unnoticed by her many millions of followers, but you can tell her heart isn’t in it in the same way.
I Love LA Episode 4 turns out to be a good test for Maia and Tallulah’s professional and personal relationship, though. Quen starts testing the former immediately, sowing seeds of doubt around Maia’s capabilities and agenda, and Tallulah realises quickly that Quen doesn’t really want to be friends after all. Last week, I mentioned that I’m increasingly struck by Odessa A’zion, and there’s a moment here that neatly encapsulates why. It might seem like she was cast solely because she’s strikingly beautiful to look at, but when Tallulah has this realisation, A’zion wears the internal existential crisis on her face for a split-second before swallowing it to keep playing nice with her host.
“Upstairses” has some things to say here. Tallulah is clearly put off not just by how self-serving Quen is, but how micro-managed and fake every aspect of her life turns out to be. She can’t bring herself to play along for long enough to make any of the capital-C Content Quen wants to make, and it clearly causes her to reconsider how she’s approaching her own life – and her potential future. Maia is, after all, on a mission to become a real manager, which involves all the flesh-pressing and back-scratching deals that Tallulah is failing to make happen at the first opportunity. Tallulah might be a mess, but what’s compelling about her is that she’s real, and for the first time, she’s having to reckon with the idea that being real might not be enough.
To be fair, despite my claims about Maia’s ambitions, it only takes Quen dismissing her one time to send Maia and Alani off on a personal sidequest to try and facilitate a threesome with Elijah Wood. They’re not supposed to go upstairs, but Wood seems fairly happy to have some company, since he’s playing a harmless but deeply weird version of himself who just wants to sit around watching clips of cartoons on YouTube. “Upstairses” gives him perhaps a few too many peccadilloes for the caricature to be believable – he’s a germaphobe with a goldfish memory who invites Maia and Alani into his “memory palace”, asks them to put robes on before they sit on his bed, and then gets cartoonishly angry when he realises they’re naked underneath – but it’s always good fun when established celebrities are willing to play gonzo versions of themselves.
The event’s a failure for everyone involved, then, except perhaps Charlie, who hilariously spends the day being very angry with a hot dude who he thinks is gay but turns out not to be – “I’m Catholic!” – who is later revealed to be a TikTok-famous musician. But the real upside of the whole thing is that it turns out Maia and Tallulah aren’t quite as bad as everyone else they’re trying to impress. Whether that’s going to limit their success in the industry, though, still remains to be seen.
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