The Pop-Music Satire in ‘I Love LA’ Is Absolutely Lethal

Tony Soprano. Don Draper. Fleabag. Carrie Bradshaw. Those spoiled brats from Gossip Girl. Those selfish pricks on Seinfeld. Larry fucking David. Who amongst us hasn’t been drawn in by terrible people on TV? I love an antihero, especially one who doesn’t know they are wildly insufferable (though clearly their creator does). So when a friend asked me if I like I Love LA, the new HBO vehicle from terminally online “It” girl Rachel Sennott, I had an answer ready: I enjoy watching it, but I dislike every character.* (*Besides Josh Hutcherson, who plays the down-to-earth boyfriend of Sennott’s character Maia; mostly I forget about him.)

Girls was a love-hate watch because it could hit close to home, at least among white girls trying (and sometimes failing) to become writers and “creatives” in Brooklyn during the 2010s. The failing part was important. I Love LA could be considered Girls’ influencer kid sister, but to me it’s like a more self-aware Entourage about Erewhon-toting Gen-Z girlies and gays scheming their way through the attention economy. I do not find I Love LA aspirational in any way—though apparently some young creatives do, on account of how well the real-world Rachel Sennott and her clique are doing. With each episode, it becomes clearer and clearer that the series is a finely drawn satire about nepo babies and celebrity dick-riders seeking online fame and Silver Lake status. You will laugh. You will cringe. You will feel the sting of recognition that yes, culture has become depressingly vapid. 

There’s this quote from the second episode that I keep thinking about. Instagram comedian-turned-actor Jordan Firstman plays Charlie, the stylist of a British pop star (Ayo Edebiri) who is insistent on 29-year-old Zendaya playing her mother in a music video. It’s an absurd notion and everyone around the singer knows it, but when Charlie’s friends hear about this, their reaction is priceless: “Why is she making a music video? Just do a TikTok and move on like everyone else.” Because pop music and TikTok are so intertwined, it makes sense that a show about an influencer, her manager/bestie, and their fame-adjacent posse (including Forest Whitaker’s daughter, True, as Hollywood nepo baby Alani) would end up touching on the music industry. The fourth episode, “Upstairses,” sent me over the edge in this regard, showing how some of the cheesiest songs in existence go viral on the platform.

It all starts when TikTokker Tallulah (Odessa A’zion, Pamela Adlon’s daughter) takes the crew to a party at Elijah Wood’s house. The party’s host is real-life influencer Quenlin Blackwell, who whisks Tallulah off to her content studio to make a video. Here, we see the overly calculated side of influencer culture. Quen’s “TikTok guys” tell her which trending song to use in order to maintain maximum internet relevance, and unfortunately it’s generic pop-rock by someone named Landry. When Tallulah points out that the song is *really* bad, she’s met with data points and a graph. “It blew up first in the Midwest with the kiss-your-fiancee at the dock trend,” says the main TikTok guy, “but now there’s a remix that’s huge in Brazil.” They layer it under a scene from Kramer vs. Kramer, of all things. Then, in take after take after take, Quen finds something wrong with Tallulah’s lip-sync. Or the outfit doesn’t “pop” for a scrolling audience (“let’s be nurses!”), or the background’s off… but never does the song change. Landry is going viral, so Landry stays.

(A small aside: Reality might be even more depressing on this front. Influencers often get paid by record labels and artist teams to create content set to or engaging with specific songs, ranging anywhere from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands. This makes me inherently skeptical when it comes to TikTok as a music tastemaker. How can I believe in someone’s taste if they accept money to promote a song on their platform? Without disclosures, how is this any different from payola?)

Anyway! While Tallulah’s off discovering Quen’s secret click-farm, Maia and Alani angle for a threesome with Elijah Wood, and Charlie flirts with a friendly himbo in a super-tight Team USA gymnastics tee. They go on an ice run, and Charlie thinks he’s about to score… only to learn that his new friend Lukas—a stand-in for Benson Boone—is “straight” and very Catholic. Firstman is really good at playing the fakest, most blatantly opportunistic person you know, so the minute he realizes this incredibly dumb man is not going to fuck him, he couldn’t care less if he lives or dies—until Charlie finds out not-Boone is famous. A viral singer, to be specific, with 4 million TikTok followers. He goes by his last name: Landry. 

The scene where Charlie hears Landry’s music for the first time is an instant classic. They’re at a gas station, Charlie’s filling up Lukas’ tank and pretending to vibe to the song through a pained face. “I would listen to this and will, probably, on my way home,” he says. A hyped Landry fires back: “Like if you wanna post a video of your son taking his first steps, or your husband getting over his pornography addiction, that should be the soundtrack!” Turns out he’s got a long, expensive Vegas residency coming up, and he needs help making it “fun and inspiring.” Charlie goes, “Are you being serious right now? That’s just insane, this morning I was like, I really just wanna do something fun AND inspiring.” The future looks bright for these two until—spoiler!—Landry crashes an ATV and dies the following week. I’m gagged for the upcoming funeral episode.

Not since The Other Two and Atlanta have I seen such pitch-perfect parody of the music industry’s ongoing enshittification, of time wasted trying to go viral in the most brain-rotted ways. With I Love LA’s autofictional edge, there’s the added bonus of trying to guess the inspiration behind certain characters, or simply the allusion of meta inside-knowledge. In episode five, we meet Maia’s boss’ partner Jeremy, a big-deal songwriter/producer who, based on the name-drops of Beck and Sia, brought to mind Greg Kurstin; the character winds up being a chronic masturbator, but that’s an entirely different story. At the end of the day, I Love LA circles back to its main thesis: There’s always someone more relevant than you, whether in Hollywood or on the internet—but they’re probably more psychotic than you, too.