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The performer joins the video call and at once begins an apology. “Apologies for the delay!” she exclaims, seeming truly apologetic. Although she's only a couple of minutes late, she feels compelled to justify. “My phone conversations always run long.” “Earlier calls made me late—I just can’t stop chatting!” Thankfully, for a writer, that’s precisely what is ideal to encounter. Besides, it’s fairly expected. Anyone who have seen her boldly LGBTQ+ and brash film titled Bottoms—that she penned with the director and featured in alongside close companion The Bear’s standout—will understand that Sennott holds much to share, be it on gender, sex, or the appeal of forming a youth brawl society. Furthermore, after watching the recent multi-episode HBO series I Love LA, viewers realize that she has even more insights about the darker side of Gen Z life (At 30, she serves as an honorary member to younger audiences, straddling eras with a knack for straddling both generations).

Guiding Lights and Creative Vision

Parallels to the iconic series Girls are inevitable and Sennott is a fan, citing it together with the HBO hit, Issa Rae’s show and Donald Glover’s series as guides for I Love LA, which tracks the travails of online personality played by Odessa A’Zion and ally and fledgling agent Sennott’s character. Perhaps, the largest spot on concept belonged to the HBO series, the program about an up-and-coming Hollywood star navigating in an often-seedy LA scene (memorable line: “nobody’s happy in this town except for the losers”). She started watching it during lockdown, became “hooked”, and resolved to put her own twist on it “targeting women and LGBTQ+ viewers”.

“I wanted to make a show where the internet, not Hollywood, was the industry, because my career started online,” she explains. The inspiration for I Love LA came—in part—from firsthand, at first rocky, transition to Tinseltown and from her saturn return, a popular occurrence for astrology heads. That period marked an era that saw her understand major truths, work-wise and individually. “My twenties began with constant public emotional outbursts and disorganization,” she says. “After relocating to Los Angeles in my mid-twenties, I found stability, only for things to crumble. “It resembled a series of extreme challenges…”

Starting Out

Growing up in Connecticut, Sennott started writing and performing stand-up while pursuing acting at NYU’s Tisch. “Despite trying every conventional route, I couldn’t find my footing,” 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.”

She took matters into her own hands, performing at open mics with Edebiri and sharing hysterical (and decidedly) bizarre comedy videos online. One, Baby Cult, followed a group of women intensely fixated on having babies; a different one portrayed being employed at the preppy clothing store Hollister as akin to being trapped in a horror film. Interestingly, she met Seligman through NYU’s movie community and eventually featuring in her initial project, Shiva Baby, a tense dramedy set at a religious event with shades of the intense thriller. The central motif of her journey, she notes, has been contemporaries supporting her, instead of traditional networks. So the old guard wasn’t helpful? “Definitely not them”, she emphasizes, stating with a laugh: “Our victory isn’t their goal.”

Manifesting Dreams

Those who questioned regarding Sennott then will likely be regretting it now. In what she labels a “astonishingly complete” story, she seems to have created the perfect project. In 2019 she shared a video named on LA life online, in which she lampooned film promos (“Substance abuse is rampant here”). Now, she’s a lead creator (with Emma Barrie) of a show about city dwellers juggling the perks of internet fame (such as partying at Elijah Wood’s house) with its pitfalls (your client being suspected of being a drug-addled stealer, and potentially becoming a “brand unsafe” outcast). It would be tempting to produce a series about online fame that was overly glamorous—or, even less favorable, one that belittled at the characters. I Love LA does neither, making for a depiction of affluent twentysomething existence that’s frank about the chaos and the glamour.

Nuanced Portrayal

“Many programs portray youth and online life with disdain and mockery,” 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