Review: I Love LA, "I Love NY" | Season 1, Episode 8

Hey, free subscribers—in the game of selecting a freshman HBO comedy to cover this fall, we probably made the wrong choice in terms of conversation, but I’d argue the thematics of this show made for valuable critical discourse. to read the rest of Sam’s take on the finale and the rest of their reviews of season one, become a paid subscriber.

You know the unfinished horse drawing meme? That crude illustration where a horse's behind is colored and sketched in, but the head and the rest of the body aren't? That's essentially what the first season of I Love LA has felt like in a nutshell: a promising premise and colorful world that have become less defined and more haphazard as the story has progressed. The majority of the episodes have had the energy of being hastily strung together with rubber bands and duct tape, beginning with an interesting setup only to have a timid comedic payoff and inert narrative follow-through. And despite Rachel Sennott's popularity as an online comedian who seems in touch with the zeitgeist, it's become increasingly clear that her brand of chaotic, wayward humor just does not translate all that effectively in an episodic format (the same could also be said about a lot of her alt comic peers who got similar starts on social media, but I digress).

Part of me wonders if Josh Hutcherson's late-into-production recasting, the project being sold solely off Sennott's vibe, or Sennott's relative inexperience as a TV writer had anything to do with the show's presentation feeling so perfunctory and self-conscious. Whatever the case, I Love LA has neutered a lot of the goodwill it built up with its pilot mainly because Sennott and her writer's room's point of view—on the absurdity of Internet fame, the clout-chasing social culture of LA, or really any facet of the zillennial lifestyle—has proven to have little to no bite or curiosity. No more is this flimsiness apparent than in the show's season 1 finale "I Love NY," which Sennott wrote and directed herself. The episode might arguably be the weakest of the season since the midpoint, as it fails to climactically tie together its already thinly written plot threads and build intrigue for what's to come in the next season.