SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the Season 1 finale of HBO‘s I Love LA.
The first season of Rachel Sennott‘s comedy series I Love LA does not end in the city it wrestles to make sense of through the lens of a bunch of 20-somethings but, perhaps, its greatest rival: New York.
After undermining her boss and being fired from her job at Alyssa180, Maia (Sennott) has maxed out her credit cards to make sure that her best friend and only client Tallulah (Odessa A’zion) can attend a flashy East Coast influencer dinner.
“I think both [cities] are characters in the show, kind of, and I think that New York sort of represents their past,” Sennott told Deadline of why she decided to venture from the West Coast for the final episode. “I feel like throughout the show, especially [with] Tallulah appearing from New York and Maia sort of having this iffy perspective on LA and the pull of the past still being there, I kind of wanted them to go back and face their demons and then leave being like, ‘We’re going back to LA.’ Like the last line is literally, ‘God, I miss LA.’ So I think that’s where that came from.”
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Maia’s taken a big chance on Tallulah, whose loyalty to her friend is often undercut by her utter lack of self awareness. That’s on full display in the beginning of the episode when, at a fitting for the dinner, Tallulah decides she doesn’t really like the dress that the stylist has chosen for her and decides to steal another one off his racks instead. That would be a faux pas under most circumstances, but especially when Maia lost her job to make sure that Tallulah was able to meet and make a good impression on said stylist.
To be fair, her boss Alyssa (Leighton Meester) wasn’t exactly being altruistic either, having lied to Maia and stolen her meeting so that she could pitch her own client to the stylist. In the older woman’s eyes, that’s just showbiz, baby. But, after an entire season of letting Alyssa steamroll all over her, Maia finds her voice and is not about to let anyone — even her boss — ruin this moment for her.
“I think Alyssa is torn a little bit, because she wants to support Maia and uplift her, but to a point, you know what I mean?” Sennott explains. “Maia is kind of doing things a little recklessly and a little different and not by the book, but I think she sort of has to.”
Or, at least, Maia feels like she doesn’t have another choice, even if she theoretically could play by Alyssa’s rules and probably still be quite successful. It’s a dynamic that young women, particularly of Sennott’s generation (and mine), are likely familiar with. I suggest that, in some ways, it reflected the tension between older women who have succeeded in industries that weren’t designed to meaningfully include them and those coming up under them who might have decided that the only way forward is to break the system and start over.
“Yes, oh my God, I wish I said that,” Sennott interjects. “That was really good…because the other thing is, you get frustrated by the system, and you go, ‘f*ck the system, I’m gonna do my own thing.’ And then you start to do your own thing, [and] you’re like, ‘God damn it, it’s hard.’ And then the system goes, ‘Hey, now that you’ve started to do your own thing, we have a place for you here in the system.’ And it’s really tempting to not go, ‘Ooh, let me get in there, because now they’ve got an opening for me.’ You know?”
As with many aspects of Maia’s arc in I Love LA, her decision not only to stand up to Alyssa but to also decline a new and very lucrative job from her former boss Ben (Colin Woodell) felt reflective of Sennott’s own rise through the film and television industry, she says.
“Fresh out of school, I always wanted to be accepted by the cool film bros, and I felt like they rejected me. They didn’t care about me. Then I was like, ‘I wonder if there’s any cool feminists out there who can help, and then you look to a woman who’s maybe a little older than you to uplift you, and…” she stops herself. “I don’t want to generalize it all, like, all guys are evil, or all feminists are fake. I’m not trying to say that.”
What she is trying to say is “all the opportunities that I got really early on in my career came from me and my friends, and I kept waiting for someone to reach out and give me something, and then all the opportunities came from looking to who was right next to me and the stuff we did together,” she explains. “It’s scarier to go and do something on your own. It’s scarier to not lean into someone who already has power. I think sometimes I was like, ‘I can’t be funny on my own…if the cool comedy guys or the cool film guys or whatever, except me, then I’ll be successful.’”
Ultimately, what she learned, is that the arrogant film bros and the gatekeeping feminists were “just a different brand of dealing with the same sh*t.”
But, for every modicum of growth in one’s 20s, it feels like there are an infinite number of other set backs, wrong decisions and confusing situations to work your way through. So, while Maia has certainly grown in her professional life, she’s got a bit of a mess waiting for her back home in her personal life.
Maia and her boyfriend Dylan (Josh Hustcherson) are on the outs after Maia completely embarrasses herself at Dylan’s game night with his co-workers. Dylan feels like Maia constantly prioritizes work and her friends over their relationship, but Maia feels like Dylan doesn’t always truly understand her or highly regard what she’s working toward. It comes to a head when Maia senses a bit of chemistry between Dylan and another young teacher at this game night, and, unfortunately, lets the worst version of herself take over in those interactions.
In the finale, the two are on a break, and Maia is fully prepared to cheat on Dylan with her hot former boss Ben, but when she goes to his hotel room, he basically humiliates her by coercing her into masturbating in front of him, giving nothing in return. While the situation is an eye-opening one for Maia, what she doesn’t yet know is that Dylan has also cheated on her…with that teacher he assured her that he was definitely not attracted to.
“The whole season, everyone’s like, ‘Oh my God, [Maia’s] such a bitch.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, but have you ever tried to have a job and support your boyfriend?’ It’s a lot, you know?” she tells me.
For the record, she thinks that both of them make valid points and, while it’s hard to imagine Maia is going to react well to ever finding out about Dylan’s rendezvous, the most exciting place to be as a writer is in a situation that has no clear answer.
“The relationships I had when I was younger, I always kind of viewed it through this lens of like, ‘I’m the victim and everything anyone else does is wrong,’ and I think as I got older, you have relationships where you’re like, ‘This isn’t a bad person. I still love this person. I still have love for them in my heart, but we are not meant to be together,’” she says. “I think sometimes that’s even more heartbreaking, because you can’t walk away and villainize that person, and I really didn’t want to villainize either of them. I really wanted to hit that balance of like, obviously she should have texted him that she stabbed herself, but also, she’s not wrong for wanting more and pushing herself.”
As for how that’s all going to pan out, we’ll have to wait and see. I Love LA was renewed for Season 2 last month, so Sennott says she’s still sorting through the possibilities of where to go from here.
“I think there are so many places we can go from here, and I have a lot of ideas, but I’m excited to get into the writers room too and talk them through with everyone and see, because I think we teed ourselves up for a lot of action, but we can go in different directions with it, which I think is really exciting,” she said.
In some ways, Sennott, like Maia, is still finding her voice. There’s been plenty of online discussion about the freshman season of her comedy series, which is the first major project that she’s created, as it settled into itself over the course of eight episodes. The multi-hyphenate 30-year-old says she, personally, thinks she fell into a rhythm in Episode 6 — the infamous game night.
“That’s where I feel like we lean into who the character is, or the best comedy elements of Maia,” she says, adding that the series “keeps discovering itself as it goes and hopefully deepens and gets funnier and better as it goes on.”
She continued: “I would so much rather have people like the show more as it goes on than the reverse. Do you know that meme that’s a horse and the beginning of the horse is drawn really well, and then the horse gets [really bad]? I would rather have people be like, ‘Oh, I like it more as I go’ instead of the horse meme.”
All eight episodes of the first season of I Love LA are currently streaming on HBO Max.