Hello Ladies' and 3 More Shows that Get L.A. Right, "Easy," you're probably thinking to yourself. "There's Louie. Mad Men. 30 Rock. Girls. High Maintenance." And those are just the recent hits. Go back a little further and you've got All in the Family, Sex and the City, Friends, and, of course, the greatest Gotham series of them all: Seinfeld. Each of these programs — with their black-and-white cookies and Brooklyn Heights brownstones, their late-night slice joints and high-rise striving — is about the Big Apple in some essential way. None of them could have been set anywhere else.
Now try to do the same thing with Los Angeles. You can't. The problem isn't a shortage of shows that take place in America's second-biggest metropolis. The problem is that, in the past, the shows that have taken place in L.A. have rarely been interested in life as it's actually lived the city — unlike their NYC counterparts. Instead, they've tended to fall into two traps. The first is pretending that L.A. — a strange and fascinating mélange of every imaginable immigrant community and every imaginable strain of cultural expression — is synonymous with shallow Hollywood (like Entourage) or slick Beverly Hills (like 90210).
The other is pretending that L.A. is synonymous with pretty much every other city in America, like the dozens of L.A.-based shows that could have just as easily taken place in, say, Cleveland: Columbo, Doogie Howser, M.D., New Girl, Six Feet Under. Very few series have gotten the City of Angels right — because very few have even bothered to try.
Until now, that is. Over the past year or so, a new kind of L.A. show has emerged. It's about life on the other side of the velvet rope — on the other side of town, even — in a complex, multilayered, still-figuring-itself-out place that feels a lot more like the real Los Angeles than anything we've seen on TV before. To mark the finale of one such series — Stephen Merchant's hilarious Hello Ladies, which airs Saturday night on HBO — here are four shows that actually get LA right. No Kardashians allowed.
What It Gets Right About Los Angeles: The city's conflicted relationship with Hollywood. In a smart review of the show's first season — which followed Merchant's gangly, bug-eyed British web entrepreneur, Stuart Pritchard, as he humiliated himself, again and again, by attempting to hang out and hook up with models and celebrities — Grantland's Andy Greenwald wrote that "the thing about Los Angeles that successful people in Los Angeles don't want to admit is that… it's not a place where dreams are made… Los Angeles is much more compelling when it's being honest: It's where dreams, once made, go to die."
That was the best (and realest) part of Season 1. Most people who relocate to L.A. with visions of Vincent Chase in their heads end up a lot more like Stuart Pritchard: outside a big door flanked by bouncers, looking in and left off the list.
But desperation and defeat isn't the whole story, either — which is why the feature-length Hello Ladies finale is such a welcome postscript. Stuart's pool-house tenant, the still-aspiring-but-pushing-30 actress Jessica Vanderhoff (a pitch-perfect Christine Woods), finally gives up on the Industry (and her sleazy agent-with-benefits, Glenn) after failing to book a cartoon yogurt commercial. Unsure what to do next, she decides to go back to college. She winds up loving it. Stuart, meanwhile, manages to trick his mousy British ex into thinking he's chums with Nicole Kidman, but he quickly realizes that his "obsess[ion] with sitting at the popular table," as Jessica describes it, isn't particularly fulfilling either — so he gives up on that, too.
And that's when Jessica and Stuart finally get together and find the contentment that's eluded them all along: After they replace their La-La Land dreams with something more substantial and mature. Merchant is making a good point about Los Angeles here — and it's a point that shows about the glamour or grubbiness of Hollywood always overlook. Living in L.A. isn't actually about obsessing over some sort of celebrity ideal. Why? Because real Angelenos — millions and millions of them — have better things to care about.
Perfect L.A. Moment: The series' final scene. (SPOILER ALERT!) Stuart comes to a club to celebrate Jessica's 31st birthday. Earlier, he and Jessica had a one-night stand, but she rejected him in the morning. Since then, Stuart has changed his ways. He tells Jessica that love isn't about "fireworks and birds singing." Instead, he continues, "it's about percentages. And 82 percent of the time I had more fun with you than anyone else." Stuart turns to leave, but Jessica chases after him. "79 percent," she says. After a moment of confusion, Stuart realizes she's referring to him. They kiss and live happily ever after. In L.A., more than anywhere else, you can see for yourself what so-called perfection looks like — and you can discover that it's not all it's cracked up to be.
What It Gets Right About Los Angeles: The city's secret lives. On New York shows, characters are always barging into other characters' apartments or bumping into each other in the hallway, the subway, the elevator, and so on. It's a reflection of the city itself: a dense, hectic, serendipitous public stage.
Los Angeles is different. It may be the most private metropolis in the world: a horizontal, car-centric expanse of single-family homes, many of them perched on hilltops, tucked into canyons, or shrouded by foliage. An easy place to be alone — or hide, if necessary.
No wonder, then, that the first enduring gay rights group in the U.S. was founded in the city's eastern hills. "There's really a different relationship between the public sphere and private lives in L.A.," David Hurewitz, the author of Bohemian Los Angeles, once told the Los Angeles Times. "You experience privacy more intensely in L.A." Such privacy, in turn, "allowed gay life to flourish behind closed doors [and] eventually gave it the courage to seek a public voice."
Amazon's excellent Transparent is the best show ever made about this aspect of L.A. It's the story of Mort Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor), a retired political science professor who has finally decided to tell his family that he has secretly identified (and dressed) as a woman, Maura, for much of his life. The show expertly captures the slice of wealthy, white, non-Hollywood L.A. that arcs from the Pacific Palisades to Silver Lake: the time-capsule delis, the upscale pizza restaurants, the laid-back Judaism, the modernist architecture, the hipster stylings, and the hordes of amorphous artistic types who never seem to, you know, go to work. As Transparent's production designer Catherine Smith recently told KCRW, her goal was to "do a show based on L.A. that looks actually like L.A. and not other people's ideas of what L.A. is."
Perfect L.A. Moment: The big reveal. Maura's eldest daughter, the desperate Silver Lake housewife Sarah (Amy Landecker), is the first to find out that her papa is actually her "moppa." But it's the way Sarah finds out that's so L.A.: while trying to conceal her own secret — a steamy affair with her lesbian ex-girlfriend — by rendezvouing at the Pfeffermans' childhood home in the Palisades. Maura walks in on Sarah mid-make-out session. He's wearing lipstick and a dress. And voila: Both Pfeffermans are "outed" in an instant. The best part is that all of this happens in the bedroom of a modernist masterpiece by legendary L.A. architects Buff & Hensman — a real life glass house.
"Are you saying, like, you're going to start dressing up like a lady all the time?" Sarah asks. Not exactly, Maura explains. "All my life," she says, "I've been dressing up as a man."
What It Gets Right About Los Angeles: The East Side. The analogy is imperfect, but in L.A., the West Side is basically Manhattan (richer, older, more established) and the East Side is basically Brooklyn (poorer, younger, hipper). And yet while plenty of shows (Girls, Broad City, High Maintenance) have planted their flags in the heart of hipster New York (aka Williamsburg) none have really captured what life is like in the Williamsburg of Los Angeles (aka Silver Lake).
Which is where You're the Worst comes in. Creator Stephen Falk (Weeds, Orange Is the New Black) believes "the best shows are the ones that distinctly have a place as a character," like "Cheers in Boston or Frasier in Seattle." So when he chose to make a anti-rom-com about two unlikable people — Jimmy, a misanthropic British novelist and Gretchen, a music publicist — "coming to grips with the fact that a post-wedding one-night stand is much more than that," he also made sure that it "took place all within six blocks of [his] house" in Silver Lake. "I live in a very specific East Side of Los Angeles," he explained. "That's the sort of world we live in and poke fun at as well."
The results are remarkably lifelike. Everything was shot on location. No sets. The characters buy books at a real East Side bookstore, get plastered at a real East Side bar, and pig out at a real East Side diner. Even Jimmy's house — a 1935 hillside design by modernist master R.M. Schindler — is a local landmark.
That said, the most authentic thing about You're the Worst isn't the show's look. It's Falk's characters — or, more specifically, his characters' somewhat misguided sense of their own coolness. Jimmy and Gretchen, with their cynicism and sarcasm and sexual frankness, seem to think they're pretty hip. A lot of real-life Silver Lakers seem to feel the same way about themselves. But what the show reveals over the course of its 10 episodes is that "this East Side world," as Falk puts it, "maybe thinks it's a lot cooler than it is" — Jimmy and Gretchen included. They meet. They have sex. They exchange keys. And, in the end, they become boyfriend and girlfriend. That's about as traditional as it gets.
Related: 25 Things Even the Most Die-Hard Fan Doesn't Know About 'Seinfeld'
Perfect L.A. Moment: Sunday Funday. In Episode 5, Jimmy's war vet tenant Edgar (Desmin Borges) leads the whole You're the Worst crew on a boozy East Side joy ride. Even though no one in L.A. actually does this sort of thing — or ever says the phrase "Sunday funday" — Edgar's route is a cleverly curated satire of gentrification, appropriation, and Silver Lake self-congratulation: Bloody Marys at brunch, Blue Bag records, Eazy-E's gravesite, "the most obscure taco stand," Asian massages, crashing open houses for free cookies. As Edgar explains — in a line that's truer in Los Angeles than anywhere else — "Fun hipster s--t is just poor Latino s--t from ten years ago."
What It Gets Right About Los Angeles: The Latino community. The city of Los Angeles is 49 percent Hispanic; only 29 percent of its residents are non-Hispanic whites. Not that you'd ever be able to tell from watching TV. There are plenty of shows about the rich white people living in Bel-Air, Beverly Hills, and Newport Beach. There aren't many about the working-class people who live in East Los Angeles.
East Los High is the exception. An English-language drama with an all-Latino cast, it's unlike pretty much any other show on TV — and that's the point. "I just felt that when I watched TV, I wasn't seeing myself, or my sisters or my nieces being represented," showrunner Carlos Portugal recently told the Los Angeles Times. "There's a void that we're just trying to help fill."
And so he went to work creating a classic teen soap opera — think Degrassi or Beverly Hills, 90210 — set in the most heavily Latino part of Los Angeles County. The show follows a vivid cast of characters, as they navigate virginity, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, bisexuality, single parentdom, and domestic violence. Only one character is wealthy. The rest do their best to make ends meet.
East Los High is clearly a low-budget series. But there's an authenticity to it that instantly made it one of Hulu's Top 10 shows. The writers' room is composed solely of Latinos, with the exception of one African-American; all but two of the scribes are women. The show is all shot on location (Boyle Heights, Norwalk, Lincoln Heights). In the first season, the house belonging to a producer's tia (aunt) was used as-is.
L.A. is a majority-minority metropolis. Its League of Little Nations is vast: Little Armenia, Little Bangladesh, Little Brazil, Little Ethiopia, Little Arabia, Little India, Little Russia, Little Persia, Little Phnom Penh, Little Saigon, Little Tokyo, Little Osaka, and so on. For now, there are no shows about the city's Armenian community or Taiwanese community. But for most Angelenos, life is a lot more like East Los High than, say, The Hills. So it's a start.
Perfect L.A. Moment: The taqueria. In Season 1, football star Jacob (Gabriel Chavarria) is working at his father's taqueria when a smarmy, besuited white guy suddenly strides through the kitchen's swinging doors. "What the hell are you doing in the kitchen?" Jacob shouts.
"What's it to you?" the white guy says.
"Get the hell out of our restaurant," Jacob snaps, adding a bitter "gringo" under his breath.
Turns out the white guy wants to buy Tio Pepe's. Jacob is upset; the taqueria was his late mother's "dream." He convinces his dad to let him run the place for three months, and with the help of a poor girl named Maya — they conduct research at "one of those fancy new Mexican places downtown" — he sharpens the menu and turns the taqueria around. The storyline might seem simplistic, but in a city where anti-gentrification sentiment recently inspired young minorities to modernize their family businesses every day, it rings true.
