After a whole season of being the series’ sole representation of normal-ass behavior, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson) is the most interesting he has ever been with this mistake.
Photo: Kenny Laubbacher/HBO
Spoilers follow for “I Love NY,” the season-one finale of I Love LA.
Everything is upside down in “I Love NY,” the season-one finale of I Love LA. Maia and Tallulah are back in the Big Apple, the city from which they both fled. Alani unknowingly befriends the woman who has been stalking her family for years. The normally selfish Charlie is actually being helpful to his friends. Everyone’s making choices that align more with the bizarro versions of themselves, and no one more so than sweet, supportive Dylan, a good guy if ever there was one. Well, a good guy before he sleeps with his co-worker Claire and lies to Maia about it. What happened to the nice boyfriend who could perfectly cook a steak, did anything in bed that Maia asked, and put up with his girlfriend’s misguided-yet-endless ambition? That Dylan is gone, and with his departure, I Love LA becomes a more interesting show.
When “I Love NY” begins, Dylan and Maia are on a break that seemed inevitable after she sabotaged his game night with his teacher colleagues, insinuated he wanted to sleep with Claire, and then failed to call him after accidentally stabbing herself in the foot and forgetting their scheduled dinner with his parents. They’re people who approach life and work differently — and Maia is more than a little codependent with her friends — and once Dylan suggested they spend time apart and go no-contact for a week, it seemed like maybe they would realize they’re not right for each other. So it’s not really a surprise when Maia plans to sleep with her old boss, Ben, given that she had fantasized about him while having sex with Dylan. It’s also not really a surprise that Ben is an asshole about her obvious lust, ordering Maia to masturbate in front of him and then practically sneering with the parting line, “You think you make these choices? You like to be told what to do.” Maia doing something chaotic without fully thinking through the consequences is practically her whole characterization in I Love LA.
It is shocking, though, when “I Love NY” cuts to Dylan in bed with Claire, that very same co-worker Maia suspected, and when Dylan lies to Claire about who called, and when he agrees to do an array of good-boyfriend things with Claire that day, like seeing a movie together and going for a walk. Dylan was supposed to be the one person in this show who had their shit together — and who, as a result, was the show’s most dependable, boring character. This is not a slight against Josh Hutcherson, whose good-guy bona fides were cemented with his run as Peeta in The Hunger Games franchise, and who here takes that baseline characterization and builds Dylan into a man you can rely on to cook dinner, change smoke-alarm batteries, and remember your parents’ birthdays. He’s so accommodating that he practically ceases to exist as an individual, and by actively blowing up his relationship, Dylan makes a heel turn — but he also makes a choice. Finally! After a whole season of being the series’ sole representation of normal-ass behavior, and the most passive member of its ensemble, Dylan is the most interesting he’s ever been with this mistake. It’s predictable as hell for a guy to use a break from his relationship to cheat. (After all, Friends got many seasons out of Ross Geller’s “We were on a break!” plea.) Within the world of I Love LA, though, Dylan doing something because he wants to do it shifts the character toward being as id driven and self-destructive as everyone else, and that’s a ripe place for the series to go narratively.
Up to this point, Dylan has primarily been someone to whom things happen. Maia invites Tallulah to stay with them, so Dylan agrees to it. Maia hangs out with her friends, and Dylan tags along. Maia schedules an awful double date with her boss, Alyssa, and lies about what Dylan’s passions are to try to impress Alyssa, and Dylan amiably goes with it. We only see him in the context of his relationship with Maia and don’t follow him independently, as we do the other characters, and within that dynamic, Dylan doesn’t make many choices for himself. I Love LA’s narrative is more driven by Maia’s decisions for both of them, which are really Maia’s decisions for herself. But throughout all this, I Love LA has positioned Dylan as the one rational character amid Maia’s chaos, relying on his facial expressions and curious questions to interrupt the frantic hustle-grind culture by which Maia and her friends live. As a result, Dylan is the series’ most relatable character — for older-than-Gen-Z viewers, anyway — and its most quietly funny one, with his concern about doing cocaine on a Tuesday, or getting a blowjob in the bathroom while his co-workers are in the living room, puncturing whatever ludicrousness Maia is steamrolling forward.
Over and over, I Love LA returns to Dylan to critique Tallulah and Maia’s attention-seeking ways or bizarre spontaneity: His deadpan “Oh shit, that’s my girlfriend” as Maia gets dry-humped by a male stripper; his aghast “Okay” when he comes home to find Tallulah masturbating in his and Maia’s bed during a phone-sex session; the concerned look on his face after he and Maia have furious post-game-night sex. Dylan is the series’ built-in emergency brake and its conscience, the one nudging us and pointing out, “This is crazy, right?” His distance from Maia and Tallulah’s high jinks is essential so the show can maintain its own mixture of affection and critique toward the pair. And his judgment of them is based on his own seeming goodness, and his refusal of the kind of boastful artifice with which Maia and Tallulah live their lives. When Dylan tells Maia that while her dreams have been getting bigger, he’s been feeling smaller, or admits to Charlie that he hasn’t felt like he can share “any real shit at all” with Maia because of her obsession with getting ahead at work, he reveals his own vulnerability in a way that’s rare for this show.
How long could a straightforward good guy last in this environment, though? The Maia-Dylan pairing was beginning to feel nonsensical — in a way that made sense, to be clear. How many people in their late 20s and early 30s end up in a plateaued relationship for too long? But it was also turning into a dead end for Dylan’s characterization. Having him fuck up gives the character needed texture and provides the show another way to position Dylan and Maia as maybe-exes, maybe-friends, maybe still in a relationship that will eventually explode with the truth. With his anti-“power couple” speech in “They Can’t All Be Jeremys,” Dylan made clear that he wants a life including Maia, but the Maia before Tallulah showed up. Does that person exist anymore? And does the Dylan who was devoted to Maia, before sleeping with Claire, exist anymore?
“I Love NY” ends with both Maia and Dylan lying to each other by omission, neither one of them sharing that they hooked up with other people and didn’t exactly get what they thought they would out of it. Maia realizes she didn’t want to work for Ben. Dylan looks uncertain about Claire’s day-out demands. They don’t look quite happy, and it’s perhaps the most in sync they’ve been yet. When I Love LA returns for its second season, each of them will need to make a choice about what to do with their relationship. It’s a positively unexpected, and unexpectedly positive, development for the show that Dylan finally gets to decide for himself.