Critic Reviews

By the end of its 8-episode first season, I Love LA has immersed you in a world you both want to live in and stay far away from in the best way possible. All of Sennott's honed comedy and drama chops come together magnificently to carry a series that is hopefully just getting started.

To present I Love LA as merely a Gen Z version of Girls is a reductive way of describing this deeply observant, uncompromising work of television.

The warm, relatable territory where the first season ends up doesn’t fully square with the savage satire promised by the pilot. But the combination of empathy and acrimony is endearing in its own right, making it difficult not to be won over by a tightknit crew out to get theirs before the world comes crashing down on top of them.

It never dawdles or feels bloated; the eight 30-minute episodes are crisp and tight, two adjectives that too rarely apply to TV these days. It goes down like a spicy Gen Z comedic statement.

It helps, of course, that the performances are natural and fast-paced, clearly taking Sennott’s acerbic, deceptively nuanced lead. These are smart portrayals of dumb characters.

Maia and Tallulah’s relationship gives the show a buoyant us-against-the-world energy, a sense of shared delusion and drive that powers both its comedy and its ache.

With her [Rachel Sennott's] deadpan humor and penchant for embodying messy young women who are their own worst enemies, she’s concocted a fitting love letter to this aggressively sunny city.

That I find some of these people more trying than charming doesn’t prevent “I Love L.A.” from being a show I actually quite like. (The ratio of charm to annoyance may be flipped for some viewers, of course; different strokes, as we used to say back in the 1900s.) If anything, it’s a testament to Sennott and company having done their jobs well; the production is tight, the dialogue crisp, the photography rich — nothing here seems the least bit accidental.

There’s turbulence – it takes several episodes for Maia to downshift from sketch trope to character, an initial barrier to entry for a promising series that rewards patience.

It’s fun enough to let “I Love LA” tumble along in Maia and Tallulah’s wake, enjoying some laugh-out-loud moments, its nuanced explicitness about sexual power dynamics, and Sennott’s general presence. But as the show goes on, its quarterlife ennui seems increasingly like something the show’s creators are trying to outrun with soapier turns, rather than a thematic concern.