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Rachel Sennott joins the video call and immediately starts an excuse. “I can’t believe I’m late!” she states, sounding really remorseful. Although she's only a bit late, she feels compelled 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 precisely what one hopes to encounter. Besides, it’s pretty expected. Anyone who know the fearlessly queer and outspoken project Bottoms—which Sennott collaborated on with Emma Seligman and starred in together with her friend the talented actress—can understand that she has plenty to share, whether about identity, intimacy, or the merits of starting a youth fight club. Furthermore, after watching the new multi-episode HBO series titled I Love LA, viewers realize that she holds additional insights about the darker side of young adulthood (At 30, she represents a bridge of the gang, on the cusp with a knack for straddling millennials and Gen Z).

Guiding Lights and Creative Vision

Likenesses to the iconic series Girls naturally arise and Sennott readily acknowledges an admirer, naming the show together with Sex and the City, the acclaimed comedy and the innovative program as guides for her series, which details the journey of online personality Tallulah and her friend and new representative portrayed by Sennott. However, the largest influence on creative vision belonged to the popular sitcom, that program focusing on an emerging celebrity succeeding in a gritty LA scene (memorable line: “only the unsuccessful find joy here”). She started watching it amid lockdown, became “obsessed”, and resolved to create a new version on it “for the girls and the gays”.

“My aim was to focus on digital fame over traditional entertainment, as my own beginnings were on the web,” she explains. The concept for the series came—partly—from personal, initially fractious, transition to LA and from her cosmic event, a much-talked-about event for astrology heads. That period marked an era that saw her understand major insights, professionally and individually. “During my younger years, I was chaotic, often breaking down in public,” she recalls. “In my mid-20s, I moved to LA and got settled. And then I felt like everything started to just fall apart. “It resembled a series of extreme challenges…”

Early Beginnings

Brought up in the East Coast, Sennott started developing and showcasing comedy while studying performance at a prestigious arts school. “I went through all the proper channels to try to perform, and they weren’t gelling,” 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. “It left me questioning my purpose and place.”

She seized control, performing at live shows with her friend and uploading hysterical (and distinctly) unconventional skits online. A particular video, titled Baby Cult, followed several females intensely fixated on motherhood; a different one portrayed working at the brand Hollister as similar to being caught in a thriller. By chance, she encountered Seligman through the university’s film scene and ultimately starring in her first film, titled Shiva Baby, a stressful film set at a Jewish wake with shades of the intense thriller. A recurring idea of her journey, she says, has been contemporaries supporting her, instead of established gatekeepers. So, not the gatekeepers, then? “Not the gatekeepers”, she repeats, adding humorously: “Our victory isn’t their goal.”

Career Breakthrough

Those who had doubts about her previously will surely be regretting it now. In what she describes as a “incredibly circular” development, she has manifested her dream vehicle. In 2019 she shared a clip called “it’s LA” on social media, in which she mocked Hollywood trailers (“Everyone’s hooked on something”). Years later, she’s executive producer (with her partner) of a series about city dwellers juggling benefits of online celebrity (such as celebrating at Elijah Wood’s house) with downsides (your client being labeled as being a drug-addled thief, and perhaps becoming a risky persona non grata). Some could simple to make a show about internet celebrity that was horribly idealized—or, even less favorable, one that belittled at the characters. This show avoids both, creating a representation of advantaged millennial existence that’s candid about the grot and the appeal.

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 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