An uncomfortable, flirty lunch with her former New York boss sends Maia into a spiral that traps Dylan and his school colleagues in a pseudo-sexual thriller.
Photo: Kenny Laubbacher/HBO
For all of I Love LA’s slapstick comedy and vocal-fried banter, darkness has been lurking around its edges like a blossoming bruise. Up to this point, most of it — Maia’s ruthlessness, Charlie’s insecurity, Alani’s constant reminders that she grew up around many, many predatory men — has been tossed off in jokes. In “Game Night,” though, the darkness finally becomes unavoidable.
To tell a truthful story about how to “make it” in Los Angeles (or, more specifically, in the entertainment industry that has claimed Los Angeles as its own), you have to acknowledge the grimy sacrifices most people end up making. Whether by calculation or circumstance, every player trying to win the game inevitably finds themself making choices they’d rather not think about too hard. It was unclear whether I Love LA would stay in a more cartoon zone or let realism creep in, but the second Maia opens that note from her former New York boss, everything changes — her face, the story, the camera angle, all of it. You don’t even have to see the message to know that it’s from someone who makes Maia both very nervous and a little excited. The fact that it’s addressed to “Lewinsky” just confirms why.
When she decides to meet the guy (Colin Woodell) for lunch at a dimly lit restaurant, they catch up, flirt, and drink (she drinks more, at his encouragement). All the while, our girl is visibly anxious. She wrings her hands, giggles nervously, and chases wine with more wine. As he smirk-smiles over his empty glass at her, she starts to shrink. She’s so hyperaware of everything she’s doing that she almost can’t hear what he’s actually saying.
When Maia does tune back in, it’s usually something about how sensitive people are these days and how annoying it is to tiptoe around the workplace. She tentatively tries to push back when he implies that Alyssa was a wimp about getting sexually harassed, but he barely registers it. “She’s not like us,” he insists. “She’s afraid for people to get hurt. Like, ‘Oh no, I tripped and fell down the stairs because my boss grabbed my ass!’ Grow up.”
If that did happen, it’s obviously horrifying. But in the grand tradition of male bosses who decide to make younger women their office playthings, he mostly just wants to tell Maia that she’s Not Like the Others — and Maia is just enough in his thrall to take that as a compliment.
“Fake it till you make it” is a cliché so ubiquitous that it’s become almost meaningless; in the entertainment industry, it usually means learning to calibrate your reactions to some truly noxious shit in the name of being game for anything. Maia hasn’t seemed too squeamish about getting her hands dirty while catapulting Tallulah to the top, but watching her acquiesce to this cocky guy’s warped worldview somehow feels different. Whether or not they ever did anything physical while she was his intern, witnessing the forced intimacy of their relationship — and the undeniable sexual tension humming away at its center — is enough to understand exactly what their deal is. Rachel Sennott is incredibly good in this episode, but particularly in this scene, which asks her to convey Maia’s conflicted response to this man while white-knuckling her way through every line. Even as the ground seems to shake underneath Maia’s feet, Lorene Scafaria’s directing picks up every shred of tension with laser precision.
And yet, for as tough as that lunch is, the hardest part of this episode to watch is still Dylan’s game night, i.e., Maia’s next stop after accidentally getting shit-faced on Temptation Island. Maia probably wouldn’t have fit in with his teacher crowd even if she were sober, but drunk and horny …? Ooh boy, she never stood a chance. It doesn’t help that one of the teachers is a pretty woman who, Maia manages to realize through her drunken haze, is “young, like me.” Her subsequent attempts to uncover some sign of infidelity — or at least a scrap of emotional cheating to justify her own — make everyone so uncomfortable that Dylan eventually just calls it and tells everyone to leave.
“What the fuck was that?!” he finally asks. A completely understandable reaction, all things considered. But Maia’s eyes light up at this flash of fury from her otherwise reasonable boyfriend. “You’re hot when you’re angry,” she says. He blinks, absorbing the implications — and then lunges for her face, hungry to satisfy whatever dark urge spurred his girlfriend to fling herself around their apartment like a breathy porn star. When they fuck, it’s fast and furious. For Maia, it’s an obvious relief to scratch the itch that started the second she sat down for lunch opposite her past. For a second, she even imagines her old boss in place of Dylan, which Dylan seems to realize in a moment that leaves him more depressed than fulfilled. He might now know exactly what revved his girlfriend up into such a frenzy, but he does know it wasn’t him.
For as impactful as those scenes are, they’re not the only reasons this episode gets full marks from me. As directed by Scafaria and written by Emma Barrie and Max Silvestri, “Game Night” is an extremely well-balanced episode all around because it’s also really funny. While Maia and Dylan are briefly trapped in a pseudo-sexual thriller, the rest of the cast carries the brunt of the comedy while revealing more nuanced layers of their characters, too. For example: Charlie going from running into his on-and-off ex at Lukas’s funeral (or rather, the second overflow location for Lukas’s funeral) to bringing their sex tape to an electronics store for wiping. On paper, it is hilarious that Charlie ends up sobbing while watching himself have sex. Obviously. In practice, is it also kind of devastating? Absolutely.
Even Tallulah gets a hint of pathos in this episode — but I’m honestly glad it’s just a hint, because “Game Night” also desperately needs the laughs her story line gives. Maia not only lands her a lucrative partnership with “blue-chip brand” Ritz but lets slip to an exec that Tallulah is currently seeing a woman. “We love that she’s a lesbian,” chirps the exec after Maia explains that she’s dated both men and women. “Corporate’s gonna flip!” So when Tallulah’s ad goes up, it’s as the face of a campaign about Ritz being “proud to spread queer stories.” (Charlie: “I get why the proud is italicized, but why spread?”)
Tallulah couldn’t be more horrified. It’s not that she’s mad to be outed, exactly. She’s icked out by its cheesiness, not to mention embarrassed for the moment her more experienced girlfriend (?) sees it. Tessa, however, isn’t phased. As it turns out, being a celebrity-ish chef comes with its own humiliating possibilities — like, for instance, appearing on a morning show to share your Hamilton-inspired brunch recipes. At seeing Tessa rap her way through lines like “How does a sausage, biscuit, side of some ham in a pancake —,” Tallulah and I both lose it. It’s so stupid and so funny. It’s also, Tessa says, proof that Talullah is far from the only person to make a dumb amount of money ($5,000 for Hamilton, $100,000 [!] for Ritz) by doing something deeply cringe. It’s embarrassing, but as Tessa puts it, “People who talk shit about you just want your money. You do that shit, you pay your rent, you move on.”
And so, buoyed by their shared honesty and willingness to get the bag, Tessa and Tallulah giddily sneak up on the Ritz mural armed with a bucket of paint. Is it technically a hate crime for two queer women to deface an ad that’s ostensibly celebrating “LGBTQ+ voices”? Who knows. Probably. But for these two and this episode of I Love LA, it’s a hell of a lot of fun anyway.
• I can’t say Josh Hutcherson was ever a formative crush of mine (I was #TeamGale) (I know) (I’m sorry!), but for those who had that experience, I hope you enjoyed that sex scene!
• Alani just might be the best friend/my favorite character on this show, so I hope she gets a story line worthy of True Whitaker’s sharp portrayal soon.
• Are 2010’s bangers coming back around, or is I Love LA’s music supervisor just catering to my millennial nostalgia centers with cuts like the Knife’s “Heartbeats”? Either way, I was startled (complimentary).
• Someone get me Tallulah’s funeral fit immediately, please and thank you.
• “Do I look really gay right now?” “You have a lot of buckles. You jangle. You’re like a ghost in a play.”
• “….what’s Hamilton?”
