The season finale of I Love LA drops on HBO and Max this Sunday, and, if you’re like me, it’s been appointment viewing every week thus far. HBO owns Sundays once again.
The series, which follows writer/creator Rachel Sennott as rising influencer manager Maia and her fabulous, naughty friends (Odessa A’zion, True Whitaker, Jordan Firstman, and her boyfriend, Josh Hutcherson), is a breakthrough for Sennott—heightened, yet realistic. Hilarious, yet stressful. Hopeful, yet truthful.
HBO renewed the show for a second season, but we will all have a void to fill until that arrives. Here are a few shows and movies to watch while you wait for more of I Love LA.
Adults (2025 – )
If you’re looking for another TV show to watch after I Love LA, the most obvious answer is FX’s Adults, which premiered earlier this year. Following the megahits The Pitt and The Studio, it is one of my favorite new shows of the year. We can call it the “best lowkey show of 2025.” Pull that quote, Hulu.
Adults is the New York answer to Sennott’s version of Los Angeles. More than a few titles on this list take place in New York, which seems counterintuitive when talking about a show literally titled I Love LA, but that’s what makes Sennott’s show so special: almost all shows and movies about young adults “trying to make it” take place in New York. After all, if you can make it there, as they say, you can make it anywhere.
Both shows are about a group of twentysomethings navigating life, relationships, and careers in that horrifying just-figure-it-out stage of early adulthood. Gen X had Friends, Millennials had How I Met Your Mother, and now we Gen Zers have these two shows. Because our parents lied to us about the American Dream, our shows don’t take place in rent-controlled apartments, and they aren’t about how you can go from waitress to Ralph Lauren executive in five seasons. No, they’re about not having health insurance, blowing job interviews, getting high, getting fired, going viral for all of the wrong reasons, and creeps wanking off on the subway.
FX recently renewed Adults for a second season, which is excellent news because not only is the show hilarious and great, but the perfect-chemistry ensemble of Malik Elassal, Lucy Freyer, Jack Innanen, Amita Rao, and Owen Thiele work together so well that we can’t help but want more.
Messy (2025)
Messy stars writer/director Alexi Wasser in a semi-autobiographical story that is, as she calls it, “a coming-of-age story about a woman who should have already come of age.”
In the film (a heightened version of her real life), her character, Stella, has just moved to New York from Los Angeles in an attempt to be the next Carrie Bradshaw. But she does not find her Mr. Big, instead attracting gross slob after intense stalker, each one worse than the last, played by a rogues gallery of Thomas Middleditch, Adam Goldberg, Dion Costelloe, and creep extraordinaire Peter Vack. They fall into k-holes on her bed and, even worse, read her the worst poetry you’ve ever heard.
Sex and the City (1998-2004) this is not, despite the supporting performance from Bradshaw’s buddy Mario Cantone. “I’m so ready to be the Season 6 me,” she groans to her friends. When one of them suggests she’s more in “pilot mode,” she turns to her only solace, a vodka cranberry.
It’s funny, scary, and naked (often quite literally) and, yes, messy. John Waters named it one of his favorite movies of 2024 (the wide release happening the following year), writing, “it’s sparkling, it’s rude, it’s knowing, and it’s hot.” He also compared it to the works of Woody Allen, which is good—we need our generation’s version since all of those Woody movies burned up in that horrible fire.
Rotting in the Sun (2023)
While the ladies ofI Love LA are the stars, Jordan Firstman steals every scene he’s in. And, if you’ve been following his career for a while, it’s easy to see why.
In just the past few years, he turned his popular social media confessions series into a full-length comedy album, Secrets, had a recurring role on FX’s English Teacher (2024-2025), which I think also burned up in that devastating fire, and had this mainstream breakout on I Love LA. But I first got to know him in the indie film Rotting in the Sun, where he plays a (only barely) fictionalized version of himself.
In the film, director Sebastián Silva (also playing a fictional version of himself) and Firstman meet on a nude beach (there are exactly 32 penises in the film) when, after snorting some ketamine (there’s a theme emerging here), the two decide to collaborate on a television show.
What happens next gets into spoiler territory, and knowing the direction this movie goes would ruin the fun. Just trust me that, in addition to featuring Firstman, the film covers much of the same territory and themes as Sennott’s show. If your jaw dropped at the reveal at the end of the fifth episode, this is the perfect movie for you.
Obvious Child (2014)
We’re going back a decade now for Obvious Child, the feature directorial debut of Gillian Robespierre. For a few years, it was known, sort of dismissively, as “the abortion movie” (which it technically is), but it’s so much more than that. WhileI Love LA jokes about the hardest parts of our lives (“If I threw away anything in my life related to trauma, I’d live in an empty apartment…”), Obvious Child reminds us that it’s serious stuff. And then we can laugh at it.
Jenny Slate plays Donna, a struggling comic in New York (there it is again!) who has a one-night stand (with Jake Lacy, maybe the last time he was believably sympathetic) and ends up pregnant. She immediately goes to Planned Parenthood and schedules an abortion on, of all days, Valentine’s Day, which alone makes it a pro-choice masterpiece. She doesn’t change her mind, she doesn’t do it for someone else, she just does it. It’s a mature movie about immature people who like to make poop and fart jokes.
At the time, I only knew Slate as the woman who dropped an f-bomb on Saturday Night Live (in her first episode!), and while the past decade has shown she’s so much more, Obvious Child is still her finest dramatic work. It was also one of the earliest films from the now-beloved A24, and one of the first times I saw a movie and thought to myself, “Oh, you can make a movie about anything.” Shows like Sennott’s wouldn’t exist if people like Robespierre and Slate didn’t make movies like Obvious Child. In fact, it would make a solid double feature with the Sennott vehicle I Used to Be Funny (2023), another dramedy about a stand-up whose comedy is both honest and tragic.
Mark, Mary, + Some Other People (2021)
In an effort to include as many female filmmakers as possible on this list, let’s wrap with the sophomore effort from director Hannah Marks. While there’s no direct connection to I Love LA, itfeels connected. Gen X love stories, as we see in the show, aren’t classic rom-coms with meet cutes; they’re about texting the dead, straight, Christian guy you have (had?) a crush on whenever you’re thinking about jerking off (to him). Similarly, Mark, Mary + Some Other People is not a will they/won’t they; it’s a who, how, when, where, and why when it comes to open relationships (or “ethical non-monogamy”), online dating, and, once again, lots of pregnancy tests.
Mark (Ben Rosenfield) is a dog walker, Mary (Hayley Law) is a kinky maid, and neither is doing what they want to be doing with their lives. When they find each other and get married, that’s a good start—until Mary, a year in, asks to open things up. It’s not something I know anything about (and odds are you don’t know anything about it either), so while your first reaction may be to cringe out (and some moments are intentionally cringey), don’t be afraid to go into it with an open mind.
As a result, it feels like a movie for our generation. While the Rotten Tomatoes scores are pretty terrible, it doesn’t take long to realize that a lot of those ratings are from folks who just might not get humor. It is a film that younger audiences will understand more than older audiences.
List Courtesy of Patrick Regal
Feature Image from ‘I Love LA’ Credit to HBO