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Rachel Sennott appears on the video call and at once launches into an apology. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she states, seeming genuinely regretful. Despite being only a couple of minutes delayed, she wants to justify. “My phone conversations always run long.” “Earlier calls made me late—I just can’t stop chatting!” Luckily, during an interview, this is exactly what is ideal to encounter. Additionally, it’s fairly predictable. Viewers who know her unapologetically openly gay and unapologetically crass film titled Bottoms—that she collaborated on with Emma Seligman and appeared in with close companion The Bear’s standout—can understand that Sennott holds a lot to say, be it on gender, intimacy, or the appeal of creating a teen brawl society. Furthermore, after watching her latest eight-part HBO series I Love LA, viewers realize that the star carries even more thoughts regarding the darker side of modern youth (As a millennial, she serves as an honorary member for this generation, on the cusp adept for straddling different age groups).

Influences and Storytelling Approach

Parallels to Lena Dunham’s Girls are inevitable and Sennott readily acknowledges an admirer, citing it in addition to the HBO hit, the acclaimed comedy and Atlanta as influences for her series, which tracks the travails of an influencer played by Odessa A’Zion and her friend and fledgling agent Maia. Perhaps, the most significant influence on the moodboard went to the popular sitcom, the HBO sitcom about an up-and-coming Hollywood star making his way in a gritty LA scene (memorable line: “nobody’s happy in this town except for the losers”). She discovered it during COVID-19, became “hooked”, and resolved to put her own twist on it “for the girls and the gays”.

“I wanted to make a show where the internet, not Hollywood, was the industry, because my career started online,” she notes. The concept for this project emerged—to some extent—from her own, originally rocky, move to Tinseltown and from her astrological phase, a frequently discussed occurrence for astrology heads. This represented a phase that saw her understand major life lessons, work-wise and in private life. “In my early 20s I was so messy, crying in public everywhere, all the time,” she recalls. “Settling in LA during my mid-twenties brought calm, but soon everything unraveled.” “It resembled a series of extreme challenges…”

Starting Out

Raised in Connecticut, Sennott began creating and acting stand-up while studying acting at NYU’s Tisch. “I went through all the proper channels to try to perform, and they weren’t gelling,” she says. “Every campus humor group turned me down after tryouts.” I tried out for all the NYU plays and didn’t make it into any of them. “I wondered why I was even there at all.”

Sennott took matters into her own hands, appearing at amateur nights with her friend and uploading hilarious (and distinctly) weird comedy videos online. One, titled Baby Cult, centered on several females fetishistically drawn to pregnancy; another portrayed being employed at the brand Hollister as similar to being trapped in a horror film. By chance, she encountered Seligman through campus film circles and ultimately starring in her directorial debut, Shiva Baby, an anxious dramedy set at a religious event with shades of Uncut Gems. A recurring idea of her journey, she notes, has been contemporaries giving her a shot, instead of established gatekeepers. So the old guard wasn’t helpful? “Definitely not them”, she emphasizes, continuing amusedly: “They don’t want us to win.”

Rising Success

Anyone who were skeptical regarding Sennott earlier will surely be regretting it today. In what she calls a “wild, full-circle” turn of events, she seems to have manifested the perfect project. A few years back she uploaded a clip called “it’s LA” on social media, in which she mocked movie previews (“Substance abuse is rampant here”). Years later, she’s the co-showrunner (with the co-writer) of a comedy about Angelenos balancing advantages of online celebrity (such as celebrating at Elijah Wood’s house) with its pitfalls (your associate being labeled as being a drug-addled stealer, and potentially becoming a unreliable pariah). It would be tempting to create a series about digital influence that was horribly idealized—or, more problematic, one that punched down at the characters. This show avoids both, creating a depiction of affluent young adult existence that’s candid about the chaos and the appeal.

Nuanced Portrayal

“There have been a lot of shows that depict young people and their relationship to the internet in this very condescending, hateful way,” she says. “I think that young people have been through a lot – I’m mostly thinking of people younger than me, like my little sister, who went to college during Covid, so she had to come home, or my other sister who was doing school online.”|“The younger generation has faced significant