Who Wants To Be On TV Anymore?
The obsolescence of shows like 'I Love LA' and 'Adults'
I have nothing against Zillennials. In fact, I’d love to be one myself since I’d keep most of the Millennial perks (like not having social media during my childhood) but avoid the Gen Z pitfalls (like missing high school or college due to COVID). Plus, I’d move further away from the stink of insecurity that defines a lot of the Asian American Gen X and Millennial experience. But in hitting that generational sweet spot, Zillennials are also tragic tweeners: too young to have shaped Millennialism, and too old to define Gen Z-ism.
In her piece about the difficulties of creating Gen Z shows, Whitney Friedlander discusses I Love LA and Adults.1 The former is like Entourage for the social media age, where we follow the trials and tribulations of Maia (played by Rachel Sennott) as she manages her star influencer friend, Tallulah (played by Odessa A’zion) while navigating particular LA scenes. The latter is closer to Friends, where four recent college grads are struggling to make it in the real world while they recreate dorm life in one of their parents’ house in Queens.
Both shows are handicapped by the fact that they are not created by actual Gen Z writers. Sennott (I Love LA), and Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw (Adults) are all around 30. Still, I’m cautiously optimistic about I Love LA so far. The latest episode had something interesting to say about the pressures that men and women feel to be a power couple, that it’s no longer enough to simply be with a nice guy or girl. Sennott and A’zion have good chemistry, which provides temporary relief while Maia hopefully becomes a more interesting protagonist (she’s basically E from Entourage right now, and I always hated E).
When I watch a show about young people, I’m at the age where I want to feel some sense of bewilderment, not familiarity. What is I Love LA saying about the fakeness of LA influencer culture that Ingrid Goes West didn’t already say almost a decade ago? Or even the second season of You, which came out six years ago?
There’s a scene in the movie Margin Call where the ruthless managing partner (played by Jeremy Irons) says there are three ways to succeed: be first, be smarter, or cheat.2 I’ve said before that we should resist turning art into hot-take culture where artists only have a short window of opportunity regarding contemporary subject matter.3 But if you’re not going to be first, you have to be smarter.
But I’ve been at least somewhat enjoying I Love LA. I can’t say the same for Adults, an FX series. The show’s supposed to be about young 20-somethings in contemporary times, but it’s actually having a fever dream about the late 2010s. The name of the show itself is reminiscent of “adulting,” the type of Millennialism that Gen Z snicker at, causing feeble-minded Millennials to spiral downward into existential crises. Why do the characters make a Birdman reference, a 2014 movie that everyone forgot about as soon as it won its undeserved Best Picture Oscar?
Most jarringly, the pilot episode centers on a burgeoning #MeToo movement. In 2025! A more in-touch show would’ve had a Nick Fuentes figure joke about “Your body, my choice!” with little to no repercussion. Or would that be too dark? That’s the problem with Adults. Its creators have respectable old-fashioned comedy credentials, like having written for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The show comes off like it was made for their parents as proof that, despite whatever news to the contrary, young people still exist and are living wacky lives.
To be fair, these shows are in a no-win situation. Isabella Rosario posted about how the creators should’ve just been allowed to make shows about 30-somethings.4 It’s a take I agree with. This raises the question of who these shows are even for. Are they actually for young people, who have their new forms of entertainment on social media that reflect their own experiences? Or are they for older people who grew up on more traditional forms of media and don’t want to have to venture out into the unfamiliar worlds of TikTok and Twitch?
Who says that cultural epochs and figures must be memorialized via the television show format? When we lament the decline of garage bands or teenagers cruising around in cars with nothing to do or nowhere to go, are we just expressing generational nostalgia? Or are we genuinely losing things of value?
For those above a certain age (let’s say, 30), we grew up in a world where getting a show meant a nobody could become a star. I don’t know too much about Sennott—though I thought she was great in Bodies Bodies Bodies and much less so in Bottoms (and the less said about the two episodes of The Idol I watched, the better)—but I am aware that her big come-up was through social media. Does having a prestige HBO show legitimize her any more than having millions of TikTok followers?
I recently watched a Youtube video that explained the fall of comedy movies.5 One of the big reasons cited is that making a comedy movie has become a high-risk, low-reward proposition: a comedian, who may already be successful by most metrics, has few incentives to put in time and effort (and maybe even money) into a project that has a high likelihood of failure. Podcasts do not have the artistic prestige of other media forms, but prestige can only have so much allure when popular demand sags.
It’s notable how I Love LA is supposed to be the next-generation depiction of Hollywood, yet nobody in it is pursuing acting or directing or screenwriting. In episode four, Elijah Wood makes a guest appearance, and his very presence as a long-time old-school actor is all in part of his time-capsule quality (for instance, he’s obsessed with relics of the 90s and 2000s like Smash Mouth and Superbad). Whether it’s meta-commentary or not, the show is broadcasting its own extinction in admitting that young people don’t even aspire to the medium they’re being shown in.
And why should they be? In times past, traditional media used to drive culture. In Friedlander’s piece, she notes how the creators of Adults wanted to do what shows like Friends did in coining terms that the audience would adopt. I Love LA has been compared to Girls, which only a decade ago, created discourse with its weekly episodes. But now, there’s a reversal, with traditional media furiously trying to keep track of the latest real-life—or more specifically, online—trends, and often horribly dating themselves in the process.
There was a recent controversy about a woman who would recap her dating life on TikTok, which resulted in several men declining dates when they found out about her account. The wisdom and ethics of such content aside, this incident made me think about how in years past, people did not have such means or pressure to immediately create material in the subject matter of their interest. This woman would’ve spent years accumulating dating stories, ruminating over and refining them until they were turned into something like a book or screenplay.
But now, the process is the other way around: you don’t get to pitch anything unless you’ve already made a name for yourself (almost always on social media). The book/movie/show used to be the thing that signaled your arrival. Now, they’re more like trophies for those who’ve already become somebodies. That’s why a show like I Love LA, even if enjoyable, feels empty and perfunctory. This isn’t Sennott’s lifelong passion project that’ll make or break her. It’s just another checkmark on the to-do list.
This all creates the unfortunate incentive for everyone to rashly make themselves a notable public figure by any means necessary. There’s less leeway for people to toil anonymously on a single obsession, taking their time and honing their craft. I often hear that even unpublished writers need to already be popular and have a platform in order to have a chance at getting published. But isn’t that completely backwards? Also, what if in the successful pursuit of obtaining a large following, you cultivate the wrong audience because what garners you quick popularity isn’t actually what you actually want to do? Now, you’re audience-captured. But what’s the alternative for an artist? Not having any audience at all?
I think about this with my own writing. Do I want to go full confessional mode on everything that happens in my life? Or should I hold these experiences in reserve and mull over them as potential material in, say, a fiction piece in the future? Is there a danger in being too transparent as an author? Or are those boundaries just arbitrary rules of a dying cultural regime? Have I wasted precious time by being indecisive?
Gen Z Is Huge. Their TV Shows Are Tiny. And Hollywood Is Panicking by Whitney Friedlander | The Ankler
Love Your Darlings by me | The Metropolitan Review
Why Comedy Movies Died by Patrick Cc: | Youtube
This process is also actively harmful for Los Angeles as a city and entertainment hub because social media, unlike film and TV, doesn't really need a hub to exist. In the past you needed the large pool of cinematographers, actors, gaffers, production designers, artists, etc in LA to make movies.
Now living in LA is only useful for social climbing and attracting marketing as an influencer. And unlike NYC and its many niche creative industries, you have an oversupply of influencers in every city now, and you don't gain actual creative network effects from concentrating them in Southern California. Arguably, being in LA makes your content worse, not better.
Los Angeles feels hollow because it is now literally pointless for the production of its main industry. And that only encourages more movies to shoot in cheaper places that give tax incentives, which hollows out the city more and also degrades technical quality as you use second-tier crew from places like Budapest and Prague, which only degrades movie prestige further.
I don’t mean to overly idealize the time when traditional media drove mass culture, but there was a logic to it that appealed to me, as a 15 year-old (lol) who watched GIRLS & was on Twitter when it aired. Today’s game, in which one is incentivized to build a brand/platform to get the chance to publish their work, just leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Like you, I wonder if I’ve wasted time mulling over what to do under this paradigm. Great piece.