How crass all of this is
Sean T. Collins on The Chair Company and I Love LA
by Sean T. Collins
Collins recently wrote for Hell World about One Battle After Another and Kneecap:
Luke O’Neil
Also read David Roth on the art of Rob Zombie:
Luke O’Neil
And Parker Molloy on the trans-erasure machine at work:
Luke O’Neil
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Load up HBO Max these days and you can’t miss the promos for its big comedy of the season. Created by and starring a cult-favorite comedy actor, it’s a skin-crawling look at a secret, sweaty side of the American experience. Desperate to find not just money but career fulfillment, our hapless protagonist must negotiate a world of scams, in which people with no morals purposely sell junk with no value to customers with no standards, enriching themselves at the expense of society while lying through their teeth. The show depicts the inner workings of its unique death-spiral-capitalist hellscape — one in which many of the characters do not even appear to realize they live — with an understanding of how this awful, soul-crushing shit works that borders on frightening in its clarity. But hey, if I Love LA doesn’t work for you, there’s also The Chair Company.
Created by star Rachel Sennott, I Love LA introduces us to Maia, a young Angeleno transplant who parlays a rekindled friendship with a beautiful-disaster influencer, Tallulah (Odessa A’zion), into a burgeoning career as a talent manager. Along for the ride are Alani, a gorgeous, amoral Hollywood nepo baby (True Whitaker, Forrest’s kid); Charlie (Jordan Firstman), a gossipy WeHo celebrity stylist whose sarcastic wit makes him the group’s Dorothy Zbornak; Alyssa (Leighton Meester, aka the almighty Blair Waldorf on Gossip Girl), Maia’s glib, status-obsessed boss; and Dylan (Josh Hutcherson), Maia’s normal-guy teacher boyfriend.
The sitcom’s chief selling point among people of my acquaintance, of pretty much all orientations and genders, is the almost shocking physical beauty of its cast. This is part and parcel of the world Sennott and her collaborators have developed for these characters: an understandably horny bunch of people, working in horny industries, who understandably enjoy having sex with other horny, physically beautiful people. I just wish that this cheerful filthy-mindedness — this show is vastly more sexual and explicit than the damn Hellraiser remake A’zion starred in a couple years back — were the lane I Love LA stayed in. The show’s opening scene, in which Maia persists in having sex with Dylan despite the fact that an earthquake is going on because she hasn’t had a chance to cum yet, is funnier, sexier, and richer thematically than anything that follows.
After that, I Love LA settles into a sense of humor based entirely on constant, repetitive dishonesty. Perhaps someone mentions a serious sociopolitical issue — sexual harassment, Rikers Island, covid safety — but they only bring it up to increase their clout, reduce someone else’s, or otherwise illustrate that they don’t really care. (At one point the characters share a collective mournful sigh because the Palisades fire cost Alani her Balenciaga bag.) Even more frequently, one of the protagonists will smile and nod along with everything a person of higher professional or social status says in hopes of personal advancement. In the most recent episode, Maia spends a painful dinner date telling Alyssa what a great guy her husband is after catching the guy gooning during the party, while Charlie, who is gay, nods with understanding as his Christian pop-star client, who is not, talks about the evils of porn addiction.