They Can’t All Be Jeremys
Season 1
Episode 5
Editor’s Rating
4 stars
****
Maia and Dylan get a taste of the ambitious life during a dinner at Alyssa’s seemingly picture-perfect Los Feliz home.
Photo: Kenny Laubbacher/HBO
Well, well, well! Is that a flicker of ambition I see creeping into the laissez-faire vibes of I Love LA? Dare I say, even a few flickers??
After spending a solid chunk of last week’s recap wondering when we were going to see a single character on this show display some semblance of drive, “They Can’t All Be Jeremys” delivered exactly that. Maia’s gone full speed ahead, pushing Tallulah to any brand willing to cough up enough money for an Instagram post — preferably both grid and story — and is crushing it. Charlie’s taking full advantage of his failed hookup with sweetie boy Lukas (Froy Gutierrez) to land himself a (brief :/) (more on that later) styling gig. Even Tallulah takes a tentative swing at following through after Maia lands her a branding deal with Kia, even if her driving lesson with Alani lasts about as long as one traffic light cycle. Our intrepid influencers are making moves! Kinda, sorta, maybe, finally! Let’s go through them now in order of commitment, shall we?
First up is Tallulah. Having taken up Tessa (a.k.a. “Hot Chef”) on her offer to hang out (aka “have a ton of hot sex”), it’s fair to say she’s distracted from her “work” duties. When Maia gets Kia to agree to an impressive $30,000 Instagram post, though, even she knows she has to take it somewhat seriously. And so she reluctantly disentangles herself from Tessa and enlists L.A. baby Alani to remind her how to drive. Alani’s advice is mostly for Tallulah to shrug off any accidents as an inevitable byproduct of living in L.A., which is maybe not entirely wrong, but as always with Alani’s casual asides, it is nonetheless concerning.
After giving driving a go for approximately 12 minutes, Tallulah pivots to an activity that’s much more in her wheelhouse: ghostwriting indifferent texts for Alani in order to ensnare her fuckboy hookup. For all of Alani’s skills and inherent rich girl confidence, she just doesn’t have the sexy kind of nonchalance that fuckboys chemically cannot resist. Tallulah’s solution? Immediately following up a nude with, “Sorry, wrong person.” Because nothing is more predictable or disappointing than a fuckboy, this move obviously works in under 30 seconds.
Onto Charlie, who’s successfully befriended Catholic TikToker Lukas, but now must adjust his stylist persona from a “WERK, queen! Slay mama!” pop star approach to something more bro-friendly. Luckily, “it’s gonna be epic?” does the trick. But he’s still completely out of his depth when it comes to socializing with Lukas and his band of merry sober men, especially once they start talking about keeping each other “accountable” while confronted with various pornographic sins in Vegas. (Charlie: “So you send each other the videos, or…?”) Jordan Firstman hasn’t gotten much of a chance to flex his acting muscles to this point, but he finally does here while embodying Charlie’s confusion, intrigue, and even relief at how nice they all are. Not even Charlie’s projectile vomiting before a run, nor his subsequent insecure freakout, can dent Lukas’ pleasant enthusiasm. Everything he throws at Lukas, from daring his bros to make fun of the “disgusting” gay guy harshing their hike buzz to the aforementioned vomit, just bounces right back off his placid face.
And so, exhausted and embarrassed — and, not for nothing, coming down off molly — Charlie accepts the warm embrace of the Accountability Bros, who don’t even want to roast him in the group chat! What do they even talk about if not each other’s flaws?! Since we haven’t seen Charlie really socialize with other gay guys outside of hookups, it’s probably safe to assume here that Charlie’s reference point is his snark-heavy dynamic with Alani, Maia, and Tallulah. It could be interesting to see how shifting his outlook with Lukas might’ve affected his friendships with his girls; unfortunately, this episode ends with Lukas’ untimely death by ATV accident. It’s very sudden and sad, and yet my first reaction was, “Where was the Accountability Squad when Lukas got on an ATV without a fucking helmet??”
Before that TMZ alert hits, though, Charlie and Maia have a moment to bond over their shared ambitions before she and Dylan go to Alyssa’s for dinner. For Maia, getting a double date invite from her boss is just as much of a coup as landing the Kia deal. Having made a solid case for becoming Alyssa’s favorite (this show really is a case study in the benefits of strategic sucking up in the entertainment industry), Maia’s now angling for becoming Alyssa’s go-to in more ways than one. Enlisting Dylan into her charm offensive is a risky step, but if she wants to become more of a power player at work, it is a crucial one.
The tricky thing is, Alyssa’s seemingly picture-perfect Los Feliz (I’m assuming) life is actually a deeply depressing black hole of myopic despair. Her husband, Jeremy (“hey, it’s Ben Feldman!” — me seeing Alyssa’s husband, Jeremy), is a pompous tool who probably hates Alyssa180 as much as he resents Alyssa herself for being more successful than he is. Even the story of how they met — Alyssa insulting a Beck song that he apparently produced — is depressing. By the time Jeremy excuses himself with a headache allegedly induced by Maia’s perfume and Italian conversational gestures, I was relieved to see him go.
Unfortunately for us all, but especially Maia, Jeremy didn’t go to bed at all. No, no. Instead, Maia’s trip to the downstairs bathroom ends with her seeing him in a rec room fully jerking it to the most basic of porn videos. Meanwhile, Alyssa’s spending her evening complaining about Jeremy losing his work ethic after a ski accident (he took his helmet off to look cool — unfortunate foreshadowing for Lukas), drinking too much wine, and wrinkling her nose at Dylan’s valiant efforts to save dinner with a GORGEOUSLY MEDIUM RARE steak. Jeremy and Alyssa’s “power couple” life is an absolute lie — and yet Maia still kinda wishes she had their aesthetic life, anyway.
I truly felt like I was watching a horror movie as I watched Maia’s face change as she started to reconsider her relationship by the end of this episode. It’s one thing when Dylan vents about people who “live to work” and are too ambitious without picking up on her hesitation to agree. Like she says, it’s not a bad thing to have some kind of goal for your life; if their ultimate visions of life don’t line up, they just may be incompatible, and that’s okay! But it’s still so rough to go from this episode’s opening scene, where they have an easy camaraderie Alyssa and Jeremy probably never had, to Maia gnawing on a fingernail in their kitchen with her boss’ condescending disapproval ringing through her head.
They can’t all be Jeremys, and having had a decade more experience with Jeremys than Maia, they absolutely shouldn’t all be Jeremys. But Maia may still find it easier to slot a Jeremy into her visions of big deals and Forbes photo shoots than a Dylan, and as the viewer strapped in for that potential car crash, let me just say: nooOOoooOOOooo…….!
• I Love LA’s sudden vomit counter: 2. Any bets for where we’ll be by season’s end?
• Maia at Alyssa180 feels like what might’ve happened if Broad City’s Ilana actually cared about her job and her coworker didn’t hate her fucking guts.
• Justice for Courtney and her extremely on the nose cat vest! Enjoy your biking apple tour, Courtney! It sounds LOVELY!
• Every piece of disturbing lore Alani drops, unfortunately, I’m so sorry, hits even harder and funnier than the last. This week, that honor goes to the revelation that her gorgeously lit nudes were taken by her dad’s former DP (“it’s messed up what happened to him, everyone overreacted”).
• Leighton Meester continues to crush in this role, and I would absolutely kill to know the L.A. nightmare people she’s basing Alyssa on. Her whining line delivery alone when she apologizes for not clocking Maia’s perfume because “I have COVID”? Divine.
• See also: “Do you know how many times I could’ve fucked Jon Hamm at Speranza?”
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