Rachel Sennott appears on the online meeting and immediately launches into an excuse. “Apologies for the delay!” she exclaims, sounding truly remorseful. Despite being only slightly behind, she wants to explain. “I have such a problem, because I’m a yapper on the phone. I had two calls before this, and I’m like, I’ve gotta stop talking!” Luckily, for a writer, this is just what one hopes to hear. Additionally, it’s fairly unsurprising. Viewers who have seen the boldly openly gay and unapologetically crass movie titled Bottoms—that she collaborated on with the director and featured in alongside her friend the talented actress—would already know that she holds plenty to share, be it about gender, intimacy, or the pros of creating a high-school fight club. Plus, after watching her latest seasonal show I Love LA, viewers realize that she carries additional insights about the darker side of Gen Z life (As a millennial, she is an honorary member of the gang, a tale-end millennial with a knack for bridging different age groups).
Influences and Storytelling Approach
Parallels to Lena Dunham’s Girls can’t be avoided and Sennott admits to being an admirer, citing it in addition to Sex and the City, Insecure and Atlanta as guides for I Love LA, which details the travails of online personality played by Odessa A’Zion and ally and aspiring agent portrayed by Sennott. Perhaps, the most significant influence on concept went to Entourage, that program depicting a rising celebrity succeeding in an often-seedy Hollywood (memorable line: “happiness eludes everyone but failures in this city”). Sennott discovered it amid COVID-19, became “hooked”, and chose to put her own twist on it “targeting women and LGBTQ+ viewers”.
“I sought to highlight online platforms as the new industry, since my professional journey launched there,” she explains. The concept for the series originated—to some extent—from her own, originally fractious, relocation to LA and from the cosmic event, a popular event for enthusiasts. This represented a time that included her learn significant insights, in her career and individually. “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
Raised in Connecticut, Sennott commenced creating and acting humor while studying acting at a prestigious arts school. “I followed traditional paths to get on stage, but nothing clicked,” she says. “Auditions for university comedy troupes led to universal rejection. “None of the university plays cast me either.” “I wondered why I was even there at all.”
She took matters into her own hands, performing at amateur nights with her friend and posting uproarious (and distinctly) bizarre online content online. A particular video, titled Baby Cult, depicted several females obsessively obsessed with motherhood; a different one envisioned working at the preppy clothing store Hollister as similar to being caught in a horror film. In a neat twist of fate, she encountered Emma through NYU’s movie community and ended up featuring in her initial project, Shiva Baby, an anxious dramedy set at a Jewish wake with echoes of the Safdie brothers’ movie. The central motif of her journey, she says, has been contemporaries supporting her, rather than established gatekeepers. So the old guard wasn’t helpful? “They were not involved”, she confirms, adding amusedly: “Our victory isn’t their goal.”
Manifesting Dreams
Those who had doubts about Sennott then will certainly be kicking themselves today. As part of she labels a “incredibly circular” story, she seems to have achieved her dream vehicle. In 2019 she uploaded a video named on LA life online, in which she parodied film promos (“I’m addicted to drugs – we all are”). Now, she’s a lead creator (with her partner) of a series about LA residents juggling advantages of digital stardom (such as socializing at a celebrity’s house) with drawbacks (your friend being labeled as being a drug-addled thief, and possibly becoming a unreliable pariah). One might tempting to make a series about digital influence that was overly idealized—or, worse, one that mocked at its subjects. This show does neither, resulting in a representation of privileged young adult life that’s frank about the chaos and the glamour.
Empathetic Approach
“There have been a lot of shows that depict young people and their relationship to the internet in this very condescending, hateful way,” 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
