The comedic talent discussing her side-splitting series about the messy glamour of younger generation existence
The star joins the online meeting and at once launches into an excuse. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she says, sounding genuinely remorseful. Despite being only a bit late, she wants to clarify. “My phone conversations always run long.” “Earlier calls made me late—I just can’t stop chatting!” Luckily, during an interview, this is precisely what one hopes to experience. Moreover, it’s fairly unsurprising. Viewers who have seen her unapologetically LGBTQ+ and outspoken project titled Bottoms—which Sennott penned with Emma Seligman and featured in with her friend The Bear’s standout—can understand that Sennott holds much to discuss, whether on identity, sex, or the merits of creating a teen fight club. Plus, once you finish her latest multi-episode program I Love LA, viewers realize that she holds additional perspectives regarding the challenges of modern youth (As a millennial, Sennott represents a bridge to younger audiences, a tale-end millennial skilled for straddling both generations).
Guiding Lights and Storytelling Approach
The comparisons to the iconic series Girls can’t be avoided and Sennott is a fan, citing it alongside the classic series, Insecure and Donald Glover’s series as influences for her series, which details the travails of an influencer played by Odessa A’Zion and ally and aspiring representative Maia. However, the largest influence on the moodboard went to the HBO series, that program about a rising Hollywood star navigating in an often-seedy entertainment industry (choice quote: “only the unsuccessful find joy here”). She began viewing it during COVID-19, became “obsessed”, and chose to add a fresh perspective on it “with female and queer audiences in mind”.
“I sought to highlight online platforms as the new industry, since my professional journey launched there,” she says. The idea for I Love LA came—in part—from firsthand, initially fractious, move to Los Angeles and from her cosmic event, a frequently discussed phenomenon for followers. That period marked a time that included her grasp significant insights, work-wise and in private life. “During my younger years, I was chaotic, often breaking down in public,” she says. “After relocating to Los Angeles in my mid-twenties, I found stability, only for things to crumble. “The struggles felt almost mythic in scale…”
Early Beginnings
Brought up in Connecticut, the star began writing and performing humor while enrolled in performance at New York University (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts. “I followed traditional paths to get on stage, but nothing clicked,” she states. “Auditions for university comedy troupes led to universal rejection. “Theatre productions at school also didn’t accept me. “I wondered why I was even there at all.”
Sennott decided to act independently, taking the stage at live shows with Edebiri and sharing hysterical (and distinctly) bizarre online content digitally. A particular video, titled Baby Cult, followed characters intensely obsessed with having babies; a different one portrayed being employed at a trendy retail outlet as akin to being stuck in a thriller. By chance, she encountered Emma through the university’s film scene and eventually featuring in her initial project, Shiva Baby, a stressful dramedy set at a Jewish wake with hints of the Safdie brothers’ movie. The central motif of her journey, she notes, has been peers offering opportunities, rather than traditional networks. So the old guard wasn’t helpful? “Not the gatekeepers”, she repeats, adding amusedly: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”
Career Breakthrough
Those who had doubts about Sennott earlier will surely be kicking themselves now. As part of she describes as a “wild, full-circle” development, she has created her dream vehicle. In 2019 she shared a clip called about Los Angeles on social media, in which she parodied film promos (“Substance abuse is rampant here”). Years later, she’s the co-showrunner (with the co-writer) of a comedy about LA residents juggling benefits of internet fame (such as partying at a famous actor’s house) with drawbacks (your client being suspected of being a drug-addled stealer, and perhaps becoming a risky outcast). It would be tempting to make a show about online fame that was horribly glamorous—or, more problematic, one that mocked at those depicted. This show steers clear of each, making for a representation of advantaged young adult living that’s candid about the grot and the shine.
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 comments. “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