I Love LA
Upstairses
Season 1
Episode 4
Editor’s Rating
Nothing triggers an existential crisis quite like a daytime party in the Hollywood Hills.
Photo: Kenny Laubbacher/HBO
It’s just true that some of the darkest vibes on this entire planet can be found at daytime parties in the Hollywood Hills. Sure, any place full of people trying to network and one-up each other is basically a waking nightmare. But when you’re stuck with them up in the Hills with spotty cell service, you might as well be stranded in space where no one can hear you scream.
Maia, Charlie, Tallulah, and (especially) Alani have probably already been to a party like the one in “Upstairses,” which internet star Quen Blackwell (playing herself) throws for friends and assorted hangers-on at Elijah Wood’s house (just go with it). But as they all quickly realize, Quen specifically inviting Tallulah after her viral Paulena takedown is a whole different thing. They’re not just crashing a random party for the fun of it. They, like everyone else around them, are there to get $omething out of it — and/or to give the host $omething in return.
Maia wants Tallulah to make a good impression on Quen, or even just a fraction of her many millions of followers. Whichever works! Frankly, Maia also wouldn’t mind getting in with Quen’s inner circle herself. Unfortunately, that dream quickly dies under the withering power of the influencer’s disdain for management. Once Quen identifies Tallulah as someone who’s actually worth talking to, she promptly whisks her away from Maia to sow some seeds of doubt about her friend’s managerial skills. “Have you booked anything since the Paulena vid?” she asks an immediately insecure Tallulah. “What are you trying to be? A fashion girl? Did Maia get you the bag or did your sweat get you the bag?”
Tallulah isn’t sure what to say. Besides the literal Balenciaga bag sitting in her lap, her online momentum hasn’t exactly resulted in tangible IRL success just yet. The way Adessa plays this moment, Tallulah is genuinely sad to realize that Quen isn’t exactly a cool girl for her to be friends with. She’s a hardened online professional asking harder questions of her than her own manager, and she almost definitely invited Tallulah over with a plan in mind.
At this point, I thought of a comment that caught my eye from last week’s recap (yeah, I read the comments, don’t worry about it): “This recap … like this show … is lacking something.” While I was briefly tempted to be offended, I had to admit that the sentiment wasn’t entirely wrong. I’ve found I Love LA funny enough, but it’s mostly been skimming the surface of the already shallow pool that is Los Angeles influencer culture. At this point, it just hasn’t given me enough of a reason to dig in — and watching Tallulah experience even the tiniest of existential crises in this scene made me understand why. With the exception of Maia’s dreams of being a stellar manager (if that’s even what she dreams of), no one on this show has any sort of driving force, let alone a goal. They just want to be. That might be true to the specific Los Angeles subculture that the show skewers, but vibes can only take you so far. These characters’ stubborn lack of direction automatically creates voids where more compelling motivations could be.
So as perverse as it sounds, it’s somewhat encouraging that Tallulah’s reaction to Quen asking what she actually wants is a nervous sort of terror. She clearly has no fucking idea, but maybe — just maybe! — this moment could prompt her to try to figure it out. But even if she never does, the show could only benefit from her considering this question a tad more seriously anyway.
This week, though, Tallulah doesn’t have an answer for any of that. Instead, she follows Quen back into the house and straight into an elaborate video studio to capture #Content for both their channels. (What looks spontaneous online is, of course, anything but.) Tallulah, who loves perks but hates work, can neither compute the levels of fabrication behind Quen’s online persona nor imagine doing anything like it to sustain her own.
Countless takes and costume changes later, she finds herself having a full-blown identity crisis, which only gets worse once she stumbles into Quen’s Hackers-level “click farm” of constantly whirring iPhones. Quen registers Tallulah’s horror, but shrugs it off as another example of her being unserious. “If you stop for a fucking second, you will disappear,” she explains. At this, Tallulah has to stop herself from falling face-first into a well of despair by making a break for it. To escape back to the bottom of the Hills, though, she’ll have to find her friends first — and that proves easier said than done.
Maia, smarting from Quen’s insultingly casual rejection, ends up tagging along for Alani’s mission of the day: finding and seducing Elijah Wood, the only celebrity that makes her nervous. She’s not at all worried about breaking Quen’s strict “no one goes upstairs” rule, though. If anyone is going to ignore a “Please Stay Downstairs :)” sign, it’s Alani, who has seemingly never experienced, recognized, or respected a single boundary in her life. Plus, she insists, “celebrities have, like, the best upstairses.” (Maia: “I know, but the upstairses is where the Diddy stuff happened, so …”)
And lo, who should they find upstairs but Wood himself, alone, watching The Simpsons in his pajamas. He isn’t at all fazed by the interruption; if anything, he just seems benignly pleased to remember that other human beings exist at all. The more people who want to join in on his favorite activity (i.e., watching clips of his favorite cartoons on YouTube), the better.
As with Entourage before it, I Love LA is a show that’s perfectly set up to let celebs play weirdo versions of themselves, and Wood happily obliges here. But there are — to borrow an improv/sketch comedy term — a few too many “games” happening with this characterization of bizarro-world Elijah Wood. He’s pleasant. He’s dumb. He’s a hypochondriac. He has a goldfish memory and relies on his meticulously mapped memory palace to get from one minute to the next. Also, he loves Shrek and bathrobes as much as he hates it when women think he wants to fuck (as Maia and Alani do). It’s fun enough to see Wood stray from his public persona, but it never quite gels into something cohesive enough to be as funny as it otherwise could have been.
In any case, Maia and Alani scramble downstairs to get the hell out of there before Wood’s meltdown escalates any further. When they run into a shell-shocked Tallulah, the palpable relief they feel is a welcome sign that whatever glitzy promise a party like this might make, their friendship (for now) still comes first.
• Charlie (Jordan Firstman) spends most of this episode off on his own, once again. This time, he hits on Lukas, a cute guy who reveals that he’s “not gay, I’m Catholic!” before driving them both 40 minutes away to pick up more ice. Charlie is infuriated — until he finds out Lukas has 4-million-plus TikTok followers, an impending Vegas residency, and potentially a job for his newly unemployed friend. Hopefully, this character will become a more fully integrated part of I Love LA sooner rather than later, but it’s not this week anyway.
• Dylan is even more MIA this episode (boooo), but him being “basically fine” with Maia having a threesome with Elijah Wood — albeit only if Alani “does the penetration stuff” — is at least another good character detail.
• Great casting alert: comedian Caitlin Reilly (a.k.a. “Girl Who’s Going to Be Okay”) as Quen’s try-hard manager who can’t seem to stop speaking in hashtags.
• Alani associating her good friend Robert De Niro most with Shark Tale is probably accurate, generationally speaking, but it still stings!
• “I don’t want people to know my address. I just feel like I’m going to have a stalker really soon, so …”
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