Best Coast

Everything’s Coming Up L.A.

Between the Dodgers’ World Series win and the rapturous welcome for the new HBO series I Love LA, the West Coast’s sprawling, sun-drenched metropolis is having a moment

Even if you don’t live in or around Los Angeles, this past weekend made our fair, sprawling city difficult to ignore. Between a historic Dodgers World Series win against the Toronto Blue Jays, the ensuing cannonfire blasts of celebratory fireworks, and Monday morning’s subsequent victory parade through Downtown, plus the much-anticipated premiere of Rachel Sennott’s twentysomething hangout comedy I Love LA on HBO, it feels like Los Angeles is genuinely, unironically having a moment.

This actually feels strange to admit. When I think about pop culture admiring L.A. sans irony, my mind is drawn back to Old Hollywood and slightly more recent cinematic history. From *L.A. Confidential *to Mulholland Drive, La La Land, Pulp Fiction, Friday, Boogie Nights, and Chinatown (among others), writers and directors have worked to capture the city and its various neighborhoods and subcultures for about a century. But how rare to get a confluence of real-world events and a buzzy HBO Sunday-night show that gives Angelenos heartfelt cause to celebrate ourselves.

Unlike New York, our primary big-city competitor (and this writer’s onetime home), L.A. is a city that is notoriously difficult to love. Accusations of superficiality run rampant. The city is home to endless freeways, not-great public transportation, dry air and hard water, clout-chasing name-droppers, oppressive wellness culture, and $20 status smoothies (which are delicious, sorry to say). All of these gripes are valid. To love L.A. is to do the work. But if you peer beyond the veil, you’ll notice that L.A. brims with multiculturalism, world-class meals at every price point, and activities for every conceivable interest. And while its near-perfect weather is turning increasingly catastrophic, even that harsh reality has presented the opportunity to see the city in a different light: The January fires that devastated the Palisades and Altadena also brought the community together to care for its own in unprecedented fashion. The same can be said for Angelenos fighting back against ICE raids over the summer.

The key to loving L.A. is time. As transplants like to tell newcomers, it takes two to three years to really know the city. Los Angeles comprises so many individual neighborhoods that there technically is no definitive number. (Google estimates that there are roughly 572, and the Los Angeles Times‘ “Mapping L.A.” project identified more than 270, so make of that what you will.) It’s a city so vast and bothersome to drive through that going to visit friends living in Santa Monica from Los Feliz is essentially committing to a day trip. The pilot episode of *I Love LA *captures the distance dynamic perfectly; when a character visiting from New York proposes a last-minute trip to the beach (starting from Silver Lake on the East side), one friend within the group throws his hands up with a hard no.

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The cast of I Love L.A. showing team spirit. Clockwise from top left: Rachel Sennott, Odessa A’zion, True Whitaker, Jordan Firstman, and Josh Hutcherson. HBO

Meanwhile, Sennott’s pièce de résistance fervidly declares its devotion to L.A. with open arms — and gritted teeth. I Love LA is so hyper-specific to a young adult’s contemporary experience here that it almost feels like something that would show up on my TikTok algorithm. I might be considerably older than Sennott’s Zillennial crew on I Love LA, but our East Side-adjacent lifestyle is frighteningly similar, with chill walks around the Silver Lake Reservoir, birthday trips to Erewhon — more of an experience than a grocery store, as her character’s friend Charlie (Jordan Firstman) points out — and Courage bagels for brunch. If you can deal with that infamous line, I guarantee you’ll begin to question New York’s reigning spot in the national bagel monarchy.

In fact, we’re beginning to feel ourselves in lots of ways compared to our East Coast counterpart. If you were in town on any night of this year’s World Series, you saw locals wearing Dodger blue somewhere on their person. The excitement around the possibility of a back-to-back title (a feat accomplished by only a handful of teams in Major League history) was contagious — on Saturday, for Game 7, the building where I live was exploding with viewing parties. It’s an overwhelmingly good time to be a sports fan here: For two decades, L.A. did not have an NFL franchise. Today, we have two — the Rams and the Chargers — the only other city aside from New York to have more than one NFL team.

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The initial, largely ecstatic reaction to *I Love LA *is likely rooted in its pores-and-all accuracy around what it’s like for a certain subset of the city’s population to exist and chase success here. (Before you come for me, yes, I’m well aware that the show’s friend group does not represent every twentysomething living in L.A., which is home to plenty of other industries aside from entertainment and influencing.) Much like its spiritual older sibling Girls, I Love LA holds a mirror up to the absurdity of twentysomething life in a city where anything is possible — or so its characters have been told. (For the record, Sennott has said that her primary influence was HBO 2000s bro-comedy Entourage.)

That said, most city-based, young(ish)-person hangout shows typically take place in New York — Friends, Sex and the City, the aforementioned Girls, Broad City, How I Met Your Mother. Issa Rae’s Insecure also followed this paradigm, but I would tend to group this show in with a crop of what I like to refer to as Sad L.A. Millennial programming, which proliferated in the 2010s (see also: FX’s You’re The Worst and Netflix’s Love). Insecure was absolutely a love letter to majority-Black neighborhoods in South L.A., like Inglewood, Baldwin Hills, and West Adams, but its thirtysomething characters were collectively struggling to hold on to the hope they presumably felt a decade earlier about what young-adult life would be like and how they felt they were falling short. Comparatively, I Love LA’s protagonists are still young enough to be eager and hungry, even when life smacks them around.

I Love LA is unique in the milieu of twentysomething hangout shows, simply because of that earnestness. In one sequence in the pilot, two characters (an influencer and a nepo baby, played by Odessa A’zion and True Whitaker, respectively) end up going on that long drive to the beach. Set to Randy Newman’s 1983 classic “I Love L.A.,” the sequence sees A’zion and Whitaker sail down the sun-dappled freeway, stop to go vintage shopping, and run all around the beach as the sun begins to set. Despite Newman’s lyrics being purposefully ambiguous about whether he in fact truly does love L.A., this idyllic montage on a show called I Love LA set to a song of the same name feels pretty sincere. And you know what? We love to see it.