The Extremely Online Bona Fides of “I Love L.A.”

In Sunday’s season finale of “I Love L.A.,” Los Angeles is blamed for getting between the show’s protagonist, Maia (Rachel Sennott), and her live-in boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson). After their relationship falls apart, Maia, an aspiring talent manager, absconds to New York with her only client, Tallulah (Odessa A’zion), a party girl turned influencer, so that the pair can attend a fashion dinner that will increase Tallulah’s profile. Maia and Dylan go on a break, which gives her the leeway to pursue an opening at a big-league agency by hooking up with an old boss. These would seem to be irreconcilable differences, but her most emotionally astute friend, Charlie (Jordan Firstman), still tries to play couples therapist, reassuring Dylan that their environs are to blame. “This town,” he says, has turned Maia “bad and hard.” “I Love L.A.,” which was created by Sennott, has a transplant’s grasp of its titular city. (Sennott herself moved to Los Angeles during the pandemic.) The setting is far from the only element that feels underdeveloped: the inner lives of the characters, nearly all of whom spend their waking hours at jobs dedicated to image curation, are more suggested than seen. The new series, on HBO, pales in comparison with predecessors like “ Sex and the City ” and “Girls,” which also chronicled the urban misadventures of privileged, self-absorbed women (and gay men). But “I Love L.A.” is undeniably fascinating as a portrait of zillennial brain rot-a product, in this case, of their participation in the creator and attention economies. In her first scene with Charlie and another friend, Alani (True Whitaker), Maia shit-talks Tallulah-at that point, still a frenemy-for continuing to post modelling photos from a months-old campaign, and debates whether to continue muting her or to block her entirely. Just as addled is Charlie, a celebrity stylist who wears T-shirts quoting viral TikToks. Both are blasé about their phone addictions, scrolling while getting dressed or immediately after sex. To paraphrase the “Sex and the City” truism, the fifth character isn’t Los Angeles but the internet. The vagaries of life online inform the show’s structure, and contribute to its seeming lack of stakes. The ensemble navigates novel problems with remarkable creativity; the problems themselves are utterly inane. In the third episode-the season’s first strong outing-a rival influencer named Paulena posts a video airing Tallulah’s dirty laundry, throwing Maia into crisis mode. (Tallulah is accused of being a “criminal” and, even worse, a “kink shamer.”) Maia’s millennial boss, Alyssa (Leighton Meester), hands her a road map out of the scandal involving a stilted, corporate-approved apology. Maia, sensing that Tallulah’s followers will be put off by the inauthenticity, advises her to take a more 2025 approach, attacking Paulena as a phony with ill-gotten generational wealth. The mob turns on Paulena, and the viral disaster subsides; as Alani says of the internet, “It’s dangerous but fair, like the ocean.” The notion that all things must pass is both a comfort and a threat. Sennott and Firstman were...

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