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The star enters the video call and at once launches into an excuse. “Apologies for the delay!” she says, appearing really remorseful. She is only slightly behind, she wants to justify. “My phone conversations always run long.” I had two calls before this, and I’m like, I’ve gotta stop talking!” Thankfully, for a writer, that’s exactly what you want to encounter. Additionally, it’s fairly unsurprising. Those who know the boldly LGBTQ+ and brash film titled Bottoms—which she penned with the director and appeared in together with collaborator Ayo Edebiri—would already know that Sennott holds a lot to share, be it on gender, intimacy, or the merits of forming a high-school fight club. And, by the end the latest seasonal show I Love LA, viewers realize that she holds additional insights on the darker side of Gen Z life (As a millennial, she represents a relatable figure to younger audiences, a tale-end millennial skilled for connecting different age groups).

Guiding Lights and Storytelling Approach

The comparisons to Lena Dunham’s Girls can’t be avoided and Sennott admits to being an admirer, referencing it alongside Sex and the City, Insecure and Atlanta as inspirations for the project, which details the travails of a social media star Tallulah and ally and fledgling representative Maia. However, the largest spot on the moodboard went to Entourage, that show about an emerging Hollywood star navigating in a corrupt entertainment industry (memorable line: “happiness eludes everyone but failures in this city”). She discovered it throughout lockdown, became “hooked”, and resolved to put her own twist on it “for the girls and the gays”.

“I sought to highlight online platforms as the new industry, since my professional journey launched there,” she explains. The inspiration for I Love LA originated—partly—from her own, originally rocky, move to LA and from her cosmic event, a much-talked-about phenomenon for enthusiasts. It was a time that saw her understand significant insights, in her career and personally. “In my early 20s I was so messy, crying in public everywhere, all the time,” she recalls. “After relocating to Los Angeles in my mid-twenties, I found stability, only for things to crumble. “It resembled a series of extreme challenges…”

Early Beginnings

Growing up in Connecticut, Sennott started creating and acting stand-up while pursuing theatre at New York University (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts. “I followed traditional paths to get on stage, but nothing clicked,” she explains. “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.”

She took matters into her own hands, appearing at amateur nights with Edebiri and sharing hilarious (and decidedly) bizarre online content on the internet. One, Baby Cult, depicted several females obsessively drawn to motherhood; a different one envisioned working at a trendy retail outlet as similar to being caught in a thriller. By chance, she connected with Emma through the university’s film scene and eventually starring in her first film, titled Shiva Baby, a stressful comedy set at a funeral gathering with echoes of the Safdie brothers’ movie. The central motif of her career, she notes, has been peers offering opportunities, rather than the industry at large. Does that mean bypassing the usual powers? “Definitely not them”, she emphasizes, adding humorously: “They prefer we don’t succeed.”

Career Breakthrough

Those who questioned about Sennott previously will likely be regretting it currently. Through she describes as a “wild, full-circle” turn of events, she appears to created the perfect project. A few years back she shared a video named about Los Angeles online, in which she mocked film promos (“I’m addicted to drugs – we all are”). Years later, she’s executive producer (with Emma Barrie) of a show about city dwellers balancing benefits of internet fame (such as socializing at a celebrity’s house) with drawbacks (your client being labeled as being a substance-abusing thief, and possibly becoming a “brand unsafe” persona non grata). Some could easy to produce a program about online fame that was extremely idealized—or, worse, one that punched down at those depicted. This show does neither, creating a depiction of advantaged young adult existence that’s honest about the mess and the glamour.

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 observes. “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