For most of its public existence, I Love LA, HBO’s new comedy series created by Rachel Sennott, was known online as Untitled Rachel Sennott Project. One wonders if they should have kept the temporary moniker, which befits the show better than its actual title; though I Love LA does go to Erewhon, it’s less a love letter to the city, nor a portrait of its precarious creative class, than a glossy, prestige brand bet on Sennott, an internet It Girl with a distinctly modern indistinction between actor and celebrity, and the popular, chaotic, very online sensibility that she embodies.
The logic of the project flowed downhill: Sennott, one of the few internet-bred comedians with real movie mettle (see: Shiva Baby, I Used To Be Funny and Bottoms), given eight whole episodes; HBO, continually losing younger viewers to YouTube, appealing to extremely online zillennials; the chattering class, starved for a truly good young-adult comedy – FX’s Adults, released earlier this year, didn’t cut it – eager for a successor to the messy, self-absorbed and totally absorbing women of Sex and the City, Girls and Insecure. All can agree: nothing gets people talking like a confident and maddening woman on TV.
