Girl’s Girl
Season 1
Episode 3
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
Paulena’s scathing TikTok is the first big challenge of Maia and Tallulah’s professional relationship.
Photo: Kenny Laubbacher/HBO
It’s usually true that putting your phone down and walking away to touch grass is an effective way to weather an internet shitstorm. Unfortunately for Tallulah, it’s also true that if you’re even quasi-famous in Los Angeles, it’s never quite that simple.
Paulena’s scathing TikTok about Tallulah being a fugly slut thief is an earthquake that shakes Tallulah and Maia to their cores; “Girl’s Girl” traces the ripple effect of the aftershocks. For Maia, this is a make-or-break professional crisis. For Tallulah, it’s a one-way ticket to the bottom of a paranoid spiral that everyone in her new city’s out to get her — and she’s not entirely wrong. Unless you’re Mimi Rush’s close, personal friend slash mother Zendaya, no Trésemme deal will protect you from the blaze of a scandal. And if your friends are all In The Industry and your go-to haunts are exclusively trendy Eastside cafés, then yeah, you probably are surrounded by people who know exactly who you are and what you did to be the main character of the day.
Tallulah also finds out about the video while hooked up to Alani’s at-home vitamin IV drip, a luxury that quickly becomes body horror when she rips out the IV in a panic and starts dripping blood all over the (gorgeous) floor. By the time Maia gets there, her friend/client is turning the place inside out to find a spare vape, which Maia quickly provides with a calming voice as if handing a toddler her precious binky. Meanwhile, Alani’s high as hell, having nobly taken the calming edible that Tallulah refused. Once again, Odessa A’zion and True Whitaker land all their comedic beats without breaking a sweat.
It eventually takes Alani submerging Tallulah’s phone in a vase to keep her from snapping at Paulena’s comments with ironclad defenses for herself, such as, “Why don’t you suck my fucking dick from the back?” Whatever works! (Shoutout to At Home with Amy Sedaris director Bill Benz for giving this whole episode — but especially this scene — such palpably frantic energy.)
The temperature in the room just keeps rising once Charlie bursts in to share his own personal disaster: seemingly all of LA’s gays have heard about Mimi firing him, and are therefore refusing to let him cut the line for coffee. (If you’re watching I Love LA looking for stakes any higher than that, I’m gonna go ahead and suggest you watch a different show.) Obviously, Charlie’s solution to this unwanted social distancing is to use Tallulah’s distraction dinner date as his own reputation with the gay service workers of LA. Assuming their waiter is of that demo, he sucks up to him with flattery, over-ordering, and a comically huge tip. Unfortunately, the waiter’s reaction is to gush about how happy this generosity will make his wife, thus leaving Charlie back at square one. This isn’t the first time his storyline unfolds in an episode so separately from the rest of the characters that none of them seem to absorb a word he’s saying, and I suspect it won’t be the last.
Meanwhile, Maia goes to work fully expecting Alyssa to be in meltdown mode over Tallulah jeopardizing their business interests. Instead, her boss could not be calmer or less interested in the sordid details of this scandal. Instead, she and a placid consultant (Josh Brener) instruct Maia to carry out the basic apology protocol for the relatively low-pressure situation of “white on white bullying,” which is “much easier to come back from.” (Even while stuck behind a desk for most of her scenes, Leighton Meester’s still crushing it.)
Maia, protective of her friend and furious at Paulena’s hypocrisy, can’t imagine trying to make Tallulah apologize in ChatGPT corporate speak. She spends the rest of the episode grappling with her gut feeling that it’s the wrong move, but it’s an encounter with an aggressively anti-woke Silver Lake mom at Dylan’s school fundraiser that helps her make up her mind. If even a preteen thinks that backing down over a cookie is a weakness, surely it’s unacceptable for Tallulah to do the same here, I guess…? “Girl’s Girl” contains several threads of darkly funny commentary on how anyone can twist #girlboss culture and “being a girl’s girl” into something much more sinister. Some of it, like Alyssa’s blasé crisis management and Paulena’s faux-feminist reasons for ratting out Tallulah, land. But Maia’s lightbulb moment, coming from a mom praising her daughter for “not reinforcing beta habits,” doesn’t quite track in the same way.
What’s more, it doesn’t even prove necessary once Alani recognizes Paulena as “Paulena Grace Rikers” (yes, that Rikers), thus giving Maia a reason to let Tallulah off the Alyssa180 leash. This revelation of family war crimes past gives Tallulah all the ammunition she needs to dismantle Paulena’s virtuous online persona. Emboldened, she does so in a snappy video response that admittedly does lose her the Trésemme deal, but instead might land her an arguably much more prestigious partnership with Balenciaga. If Maia ends this season as a full-blown PR monster, finding kinship with that noxious mom to such success will absolutely be the moment that made it possible.
• Tallulah’s nerves around the hot chef who slid into her DMs is extremely understandable once she’s revealed to be a butch Moses Ingram, because hot. It’s a shame Tallulah couldn’t relax enough to indulge in some storeroom sex with her, but judging by her (also very hot!) move of sharing her number in a jar of rice for Tallulah’s drowned phone, this can’t be the last we see of her.
• Congrats to Dylan, whose principal’s response to seeing a meme of his employee doing a wild amount of coke isn’t “you’re fired,” but “can you get my friends some?” Doesn’t exactly solve the problem of that photo living on the internet forever, but convenient in the short-term, anyway.
• “If Talullah gets a reputation as ‘brand unsafe,’ I’m fucked. What’s she going to do, write a book?”
• “It’s like my dad used to say: ‘we’re not letting another indictment ruin Christmas.’”
• “She just broke my phone. What am I supposed to look at?!?”
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