For a TV show centering on twentysomethings navigating Los Angeles, “I Love LA” doesn’t concern itself too much with Hollywood, with the main throughline of the HBO series centering on Rachel Sennott’s Maia managing the rising career of influencer and best friend Tallulah (Odessa A’zion). It’s a lens of the city that felt authentic and fresh for creator/EP/star Sennott, who kickstarted her career online before writing, producing and starring in films like “Shiva Baby” and “Bottoms.”
“I haven’t really seen the internet as an industry depicted in film and TV yet — It felt refreshing and exciting to be in LA and not have it be about Hollywood,” Sennott told TheWrap, joking “I’m sick of Hollywood. We’re here every day — let’s do phones. We wanted to do something that felt very specific to now … a lot of today’s artists [and] … so many young people are online.”
“It feels like now you hear more, ‘I want to be internet famous’ than ‘I want to be a movie star,’” c0-showrunner Emma Barrie said, while Sennott added that movie stars are logging onto TikTok for makeup tips. “Rachel had so much experience with being online, being on the internet — you can mine so much from it. It’s just a fascinating world.”
With that, Sennott and Barrie set out to create “‘Entourage’ for internet it girls,” narrowing in on the business aspect of influencing for the HBO comedy series. Their other inspirations included Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” to which “I Love LA” has already drawn plenty of comparisons, as well as “Sex and the City” and “Atlanta.” “It was putting everything in a blender and then taking an ounce of that, and then taking Rachel’s real experiences and creating our own tone,” Barrie said.
Sennott drew from her own journey of moving from New York City to Los Angeles during the COVID-19 pandemic, recalling that she felt “isolated and unsure of where all [her] friends were going to end up.” Ultimately, Sennott pointed to her Saturn return — a period of growth and transition that typically occurs in one’s late 20s — as the inspiration for the series’ plot.
“My early 20s were really chaotic and messy and then my mid-20s, I felt like I settled. Then in the last few years it almost felt like the all the chaos from my early 20s came back and everything got shaken up,” Sennott said.
In “I Love LA,” that chaos takes form in Maia’s estranged best friend, Tallulah, who unexpectedly shows up years after she traded LA to move back to New York. “Maia is like how I was before my Saturn Return hit. That old version coming in and shaking things up, and then ultimately for the better, because Maia and Tallulah are better together.”
Sennott was always attached to play Maia, and the main friend group quickly took shape with A’zion as Tallulah, Jordan Firstman as Charlie and True Whitaker as Alani, with Sennott noting the cast felt “meant to be,” even as Whitaker’s unique comedic timing shifted what the duo had originally planned for her character.
Sennott and Barrie recalled being blown away by A’zion, who “started sobbing” in the middle of an emotional scene during a Zoom audition. “We needed someone who you could just believe is this really magnetic, charismatic person online,” Barrie said. “she had that ‘Yeah, of course, she would be famous online.’”
Leighton Meester, who plays Maia’s excruciating boss Alyssa, was also attached to “I Love LA” since the pilot. “Every little breath and cough … she’s a scene stealer every time,” Sennott said.
Josh Hutcherson, who plays Maia’s longterm boyfriend, Dylan, came onboard through a recasting, replacing Miles Robbins, who appeared in the initial pilot before the character was altered during the writing process.
“With the pilot process, you write what you hope the show will be, but of course, it goes through changes, and so the character just changed,” Sennott explained, noting she hopes to work with Robbins down the line in a different role. “Josh is so talented, I think he’s really funny, and he brought sort of this natural, outsider perspective to the friend group, where he has a different point of view than the characters — the things that matter to him are different than what matter to the rest of the characters.”
“He fit into that role as boyfriend who all the friends love, and he’s so sweet … but they are of two different worlds,” Barrie added.
While Sennott has plenty of experience playing double duty in front of and behind the camera on the film side, “I Love LA” marks her first foray into showrunning, with Sennott noting she leaned on Barrie, who has writing credits on “Barry” and “Splitting Up Together” and was set up with Sennott on a “blind date” by HBO.
“Emma has so much more experience than me as a writer in rooms, and so she really helped me through the process. But we had both never showrun before, so it really felt like we were a team and collaborating,” Sennott said, adding that she never felt embarrassed to ask things new to her in the process. “We would be in a meeting where everyone’s saying a word over and over and then I would be like, what does the word ‘vestigial’ mean?”
“I lean on Rachel all the time because she’s got the charisma and the stories and the attitude,” Barrie said.
Sennott noted she also leaned on HBO comedy chief Amy Gravitt, HBO SVP of original programming Allie Wasserman, EP Max Silvestri and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” writer Jeff Schaffer, who Sennott admitted she would text in the “middle of the night being like, ‘Jeff, I’m scared,’ and he would be, ‘it’s OK.’”
For much of the development process, the half-hour comedy was dubbed the untitled Rachel Sennott project, which is so ingrained in the show’s identity that the “untitled” title lined the premiere’s red carpet. Barrie noted that “I Love LA” feels “a little tongue in cheek” with “how hard their experience is in their late 20s in LA.”
“They do love LA and we do love LA,” Barrie said “For me, at least, [the show] feels so much like a love letter to LA, a little bit, even knowing how terrible it is here sometimes.”
“It’s the contrast of both,” Sennott said. “It’s the glamor and the despair, it’s all of those things.”
The series captures the city’s quintessential locations — including being the first production to shoot inside an Erewhon — adding to the growing list of shows that prioritize shooting in LA. “We had the most incredible crew who was also just so excited to finally shoot here — some of them were, like, ‘I haven’t shot here in 15 years,’ ” Barrie said. “I’ve lived here most of my life, and Rachel’s lived here a long time, and so to be able to take these real places and these real experiences we’ve had and turn them into more cinematic moments felt really special.”
With Season 1 launching Sunday nights on HBO, Sennott revealed she would hope for the series to run for several seasons. “I had so much fun making it and I want to do it again, because it is really just the most amazing group of
people.”
“We’ll do it forever if we can,” Barrie said.
“I Love LA” premieres Sunda at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and HBO Max.
