Summary
I Love LA introduces some darkness in Episode 6, as the city’s influence begins to warp personalities and pollute relationships.
I Love LA has been a comedy since the beginning, and it’s still a comedy in Episode 6, but only just. The line between slapstick sitcom shenanigans and genuine moral darkness is becoming a little blurry. In “Game Night”, this is primarily expressed through Maia, who has been prone to a bit of ruthlessness in regard to her careerism, but here crosses the transom into borderline psychopathy and moral vacuity. Funny, since initially she was largely the audience POV foil to Tallulah’s outlandish influencer caricature. How the roles have reversed.
This was, admittedly, teed up in the previous episode. The fact that Maia saw Alyssa’s entirely fabricated life as enviable and began to consider Dylan surplus to requirements was a pretty big warning sign. The sudden arrival of a note from her former New York boss (Colin Woodell) just hastens her along a path she was clearly already on. Her former boss’s pet name for her implies an illicitness to their relationship that is basically confirmed by the flirty lunch they enjoy. Maia’s all ears for the dude’s insane rambling about how other people like Alyssa are “not like them”, too weak, too “afraid for people to get hurt”, but Maia’s barely listening.
I’m not totally sure what the implication is here. It’s far too easy to accuse Maia of being head-over-heels for this guy; there’s a predatory quality to the dynamic that isn’t expressed explicitly but is very obvious in Sennott’s performance and the way the scene is framed. Maia is suddenly a prisoner, or at least a plaything, irrespective of whether she’s clinging to every word for simple, albeit confusing sexual reasons or because she has been groomed over a period of time that extends all the way back to her career in New York. You’re not supposed to be able to tell.
How Maia, now drunk and impossibly horny, responds to the experience is nonetheless patently insane. She goes home to try and get Dylan into bed, but he’s enjoying game night with his colleagues, one of whom is young and pretty enough to send Maia into a psychological tailspin. She’s aggressive, over-the-top, and pushy with everyone, including Dylan, to enough of an extent that he eventually just has to ask everyone to leave for the sake of his own career and social life. Maia gets her way – an angry seeing-to during which she briefly imagines her old boss in Dylan’s place – but the transactional nature of the encounter doesn’t go unnoticed by either of them. There’s a crushing look on Dylan’s face when he realises he was just playing a dutiful role in someone else’s torrid fantasy.
What’s clever about I Love LA Episode 6 is how it uses Maia’s moral decline to examine everyone else in more honest, human terms. The gimmick is that while everyone was previously living a half-baked fantasy of vocal fry and brand deals, when the chips are down, that turns out not to be enough for everyone except Maia. Charlie, for instance, is still grappling with Lukas’s sudden death, and this ends up being looped into his long-time on-again-off-again “relationship” with the dude we’ve seen a few times already in fleeting connective scenes. It’s largely played for laughs – Charlie and Alani end up taking a couple of the former’s home movies to an electronics store to figure out which is a sex tape that needs to be purged from existence – but there’s also a note of real emotional pain here, especially when Charlie’s reminiscence leads him to seek accountability from Lukas’s now-defunct number.
Another consequence of Maia’s aggressive ambition is Tallulah’s reputation. She’s now the face of Ritz – yes, the crackers – which seems like a pretty safe partnership, but Maia also lets slip to one of their executives that Tallulah is seeing a woman, which leads to the entire campaign being geared around Tallulah being a lesbian. Tallulah’s mortified, not because she’s ashamed of or in denial about her sexuality, but because of the cavalier way it has been deployed – by both Maia personally and Ritz in general – as a selling point. Luckily, Tessa is no stranger to making herself look stupid for money, so she helps to reassure Tallulah that these kinds of compromises are just part of the game. They also deface the Ritz billboard with paint for good measure.
But this situation isn’t tenable for anyone. Maia’s going to get people hurt, and not just Dylan. Everyone in her ambit is liable to be sucked into her own efforts to get ahead, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that when it comes to satisfying her own appetites, anyone else is just acceptable collateral damage. Welcome to L.A.
