Summary
I Love LA changes tack in “They Can’t All Be Jeremys”, which finds its professionally vacuous characters suddenly realising they have ambitions – for better and, more likely, for worse.
What do you get when you take a show about mindless excess and complete, weaponised vacuity, and then have everyone in it suddenly realise that they want to do something meaningful with their lives? You get something very much like Episode 5 of I Love LA, in which several internal existential crises happen at once. Some people don’t want enough. Others want too much. Nobody, thanks to their own deficiencies or cruel circumstances, seems capable of getting – or at least keeping – the things they want either way. And it’s all very funny, about as much as it’s deeply sad.
I have a sneaking suspicion this show is going to end in tears. I didn’t think that initially – even the premiere gave the vibe of a bunch of morons ultimately falling on their feet. But now I’m worried. The closer these people seem to want to be to success, the more they realise how far away they currently are. And increasingly, that doesn’t just apply to professional success either.
After last week’s episode took more of a classic sitcom turn in its very exaggerated premise, “They Can’t All Be Jeremys” returns to Maia’s ongoing efforts to send her and Tallulah’s careers into overdrive while everyone else around her just makes an effort to navigate their own lives. Given the intensity of Maia’s drive, she probably doesn’t even notice that Tallulah is barely in this episode. She shows up briefly at the start in bed with Tessa, the hot chef glimpsed in a previous episode, and then has a driving lesson with Alani because Maia has gotten her a $30,000 Kia partnership, but her heart isn’t in it. They’re both more worried about each other’s sex lives than they are their careers, but it hasn’t quite dawned on Tallulah that they’re not on equal footing. Alani is already a nepo baby, and the more she reveals about her weird life, the more terrifying it becomes (including her personal collection of high-quality nudes having been taken by her dad’s former DP).
Things are finally looking up for Charlie, meanwhile. He’s still trapped in the orbit of Lukas, the TikTok-famous Catholic musician he met last week, but he has managed to land himself both a styling gig and a surprisingly earnest group of new friends. It’s initially very funny watching Charlie try to adapt his over-the-top persona to what he assumes are a bunch of bros, but the twist in I Love LA Episode 5 is that Lukas and his pals are all achingly earnest dudes who are just trying to keep each other accountable for their actions. Every time Charlie feels like he has made a fool of himself, he’s warmly embraced and reassured for what we’re led to believe is perhaps the first time in his life.
This initially manifests as funny stuff like Charlie not quite getting how sincere everyone is, and reflexively lashing out when he does something that would make him eligible for mockery in the spaces he typically inhabits. But after a while, he realises it’s genuine, and the support legitimately changes his entire personality. He’s immediately more mature and empathetic. The accountability squad supports him in the group chat. He really does seem to have turned a personal corner, which makes it all the more worrying when it’s revealed at the very end of the episode that Lukas has died in an ATV accident.
It’s Maia who sees this breaking news alert. It’s also Maia who gets the bulk of the focus in I Love LA Episode 5, since she’s trying to finesse more influence at work by bonding with Alyssa on a personal level, a mission for which she recruits Dylan as her double-date plus-one. He’s reluctant, since the last time he hung around with one of Maia’s associates, it didn’t go too well, but he’s a supportive guy, so he agrees to schmooze Alyssa and her supposedly perfect producer husband, Jeremy.
Needless to say, the joke here is that Jeremy’s awful, and Alyssa’s life is largely a fabrication, though the amount of complicity she has in the fiction is somewhat mysterious. She doesn’t know, for instance, that Jeremy’s supposedly crippling headaches stemming from a ski accident and triggered by Maia’s perfume are really just an excuse for him to slope off and jerk it – while standing! – to vanilla adult films. But where this should be the moment that Maia realises her ambition is misplaced, and the life she’s striving for is simply an illusion, she instead becomes swayed by Alyssa’s fake lifestyle – which she knows is fake – and her claims that Dylan isn’t good enough for her.
This is the deeply tragic part of the whole thing. Maia and Dylan’s relationship isn’t perfect; they’re both young, their careers are misaligned, and they might not have worked out anyway. But it’s significantly more “real” than what Alyssa and Jeremy have, and yet Maia, almost inexplicably, covets Alyssa’s life more than her own. That doesn’t bode well for Dylan in the short term, and in the long term, it doesn’t bode well for Maia either. Let’s just hope she realises that sooner rather than later.
