Catching Gen Z With Rachel Sennott's I Love LA

Sandy explores a recent Ankler.com article titled: 'Gen Z Is Huge. Their TV Shows Are Tiny. And Hollywood Is Panicking,' written by Whitney Friedlander. Showrunners Nahnatchka Khan, Ben Kronengold, and Rebecca Shaw, along with top executives, discuss the industry's biggest missed demographic target, and how the HBO series 'I LOVE LA,' created by Rachel Sennott, about a close-knit friend group that reunites after years apart to navigate ambition, relationships, and personal changes, has achieved the nearly impossible: getting Gen Z to stop scrolling and watch her show.  

Executive Producer Kristin Overn
Creator/Executive Producer Sandy Adomaitis
Producer Terry Sampson
Music by Ethan Stoller

Transcript

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Hello, my name is Sandy Adamidis, the social media director for the Page International Screenwriting Awards and your host for the Writers Hangout, a podcast that celebrates the many From inspiration to the first draft, revising, getting the project made, and everything in between. We'll talk to the best and the brightest in the entertainment industry, and create a space where you can hang out, learn from the pros, and have fun. Hey, writers, it's Sandy. I'm coming to you on a rainy night in Studio City, the crown jewel of the San Fernando Valley, where the iconic Ventura Boulevard runs through neighborhoods including Studio City, Sherman Oaks, and Cino Tarzana, and Woodland Hills connected by the 1 0 1 Freeway. Did you binge anything over the holidays? Go to the movies. A lot of you did go to see Avatar Fire and Ash because it dominated the 2025 Christmas New Year's season box office by generating hundreds of millions worldwide. Meanwhile, Timothy Shamas Marty Supreme performed pretty strongly alongside hits like Zootopia two. Remember last week's episode, which was about vertical storytelling and how writers are finding it a new frontier, and it's becoming a good way to break into or stay active in the industry. I came across an interesting article from the aler.com and I wanted to discuss it with you. I thought this would be a great companion piece to last week's episode. The title is Gen Z is huge. Their TV shows are tiny and How Hollywood is Panicking, written by Whitney Freelander. HBO's. I love LA is the kind of comedy the brand does best. A Click Beatty show about a niche demo that's bound to get headlines and awards coverage, if not broad viewership variety. Put creator star. Rachel Senate on its cover ahead of the show's November 2nd debut, declaring her owed to the dreams, ambitions, and clueless narcissism of a particular brand of 20 and early 30 somethings as generational text and labeling it a next gen version of Lena Dunham's polarizing 2010s HBO series girls. Now I have to interject here. I was late to girls. I didn't watch it when it first came out, but I'm pretty sure that was 2012 when it came out. Back to the article, critics fell right into HBO's Clutches either claiming that I love LA made them feel seen or getting very angry about the show. While USA today's critic, Kelly Lawler deemed it a prestige TV fantasy of the chronically online Vultures, Nicholas Quo wrote that if nothing else, the show will be a time capsule for This particular moment in culture when Los Angeles teams with influencers chasing clout. Underlying the discussion, the uneasy reality that TV once defined. Young adulthood. Now Gen Z defines culture and TV is struggling to keep up viewership. Data backs this up. 65% of what 16 to 34 year olds watch Is library tv. Not new series. In other words, the dominant youth audience isn't discovering new Hollywood shows. They're rewatching old ones. HBO is bullish on. I love LA On Thursday, it announced a second season renewal for the series, calling it Among the Fastest growing of its original comedies, averaging nearly 2 million cross-platform viewers In the us. These are hardly it. Welcome to Dairy numbers, but we can't all be genre series based on Blockbusters ips. Okay. Writers it. Welcome to dairy. if you don't know, it's a supernatural horror television series that serves as a prequel to the films. it, which came out in 2017 and it chapter two, which came out in 2019. The series premiered on HBO on October 26th, 2025. and unless you live in a sewer, we all know that it comes from the legendary horror author Stephen King who wrote it, His iconic 1986 novel about a shape shifting creature that prays on children in the fictional town of Dairy Maine. the season average was 11.5 million US viewers per episode and 20 million global viewers per episodes. Back to the article, when I asked Senate 30 at the show's premier press conference, what exactly it meant to be a quintessential Gen Z comedy. She laughed even. She had no idea. I love LA draws inspiration not just from girls she said, but also HBO, sex in the City and entourage and FX Atlanta. Ideally, what we wanted to create was our own unique tone. Something that felt unique to us and was very specific to now. She added Senate's, CoStar, Jordan Furman 34, Whose own resume includes several shows in this genre search party English teacher highlighted one key distinction between today's learning to adult TV and the previous generation's version. the ethos of a lot of what was going on in that millennial renaissance was very self-effacing. Like, I am just gonna rip into myself and show that I'm depressed and show my depression. He said at the presser, I think Gen Z has a bit of a sillier more fun approach for those who spark to it. I love LA's unhinged Energy is definitely fun, but for those who don't, there aren't many alternatives in the quest to be the Archetypical gen Z comedy, the show's closest contemporary is FX adults about a chosen family of 20 somethings squatting in one of their childhood homes in Queens. Gen Z is the country's second largest demographic After millennials. Nearly 70 million. And audience. Hollywood's future depends on, and yet the marketplace for shows geared toward 20 somethings is almost wide open. I talk to creators, adults Ben Cronin Gold, and Rebecca Shaw la Nka kahan and stumbles. Jeff Ostroff. I once was in a fire drill with Jeff Ostroff. It was weird. Not Jeff wasn't weird. It was. It was just a weird moment. But I don't know if I ever do a Patreon. I'll tell that story in another time. Stumbles, Jeff Ostroff and current and former development execs in including FX EVP, Kate Lambert and NBC U'S Exec VP of Comedy Development, Jeff Myerson, to dig into the state of Gen Z comedy. What this cohort is watching and not, and why. Their very specific, extremely online vibe and influencer shaped cultural worldview makes them so tough to pinpoint and please, friends, living single. How I Met Your Mother, these shows connected because they're about love and work and how things change when the first of the crew has a baby, buys a house, gets a new job, relatable milestones to deconstruct, laugh about and celebrate. but Gen Z doesn't have much to celebrate in these arenas. Unemployment rates for young workers hit 10.8% over the summer compared to the fourth 0.3% overall. And when they are not on the job, they're miserable and feel undervalued. AI and other forces mean as a source recently told New York Magazine, there's no reason to deal with the headaches of having young employees who frequently do the wrong thing, who frequently, take up time and space. Wait, I gotta pause there and just say, what I've noticed out in the workforce, because as you know, I sometimes will jump back in to work on a TV show, is that the younger workforce is not really being trained and taught the way I certainly was when I was coming up. Now there also is the flip side of that. I also see the younger workforce not ask questions and look really annoyed when you tell them anything. I've also seen the younger workforce really lean into that whole fake it till you make it. Never let anybody know that you don't know what's going on. There are absolutely situations where that's called for, but when you go to work, you deserve someone to train you. You deserve to be able to ask a lot of questions. And I think both sides should meet in the middle. And I am available for consultation. Where are we on this article? Oh, we're talking about Gen Z not being happy at work. And as for love, not only are fewer of them dating than in previous generations, but according to a recent survey from dating advice.com and Kinzie, nearly half of Gen Z adults have never even had sex. It's also harder than ever to figure out exactly what Gen Z is into, or to keep up with it as the smallest screens increasingly drive the culture. Jeff Astro 59, an alum of the friends writing room and co-creator of the new NBC cheerleading Mockumentary stumble points out speaking with authority as a parent of two 20 somethings that if David Crane and Marta Kaufman's series took place, now Chandler would go on his phone the entire episode. There's no way a TV show can match the speed at which language trends and conversations happen online, nor can those cultural forces be ignored adults. Creator Cronin Gold 29 and Shaw 30 told me they get around this by creating their own in show language, invented and shared by the central friend group. When a character wants to get something off their chest, but doesn't want it to be a thing, for example, they'll preface it with A Mine Wipe, okay. A mine wipe. To people will be talking and one will say, mine wipe. I stole a bunch of bananas. The other person will say, Hey, kids do things like that. And then the other character will come back with that was last Tuesday, so mine wipe, back to the article. A big part of Friends' Legacy is its lasting. Coinages. Remember on a break, lobster friend zone, Kate Lambert, executive Vice President of Development at Fox Entertainment says she bought adults in a pitch meeting. Not necessarily because it featured young characters but because she was looking for an ensemble comedy, and in a world where anyone can become a named influencer online, also coming out of a peak TV bubble when many talents still had their own deals that were largely intended to set them up. For star vehicles, it's hard to create and cast an ensemble series. We're always looking for really specific characters and really specific voices. She says, but hopefully there's something universal in that character, in that story, in that show that latches onto a larger audience. Is Gen Z worth the chase? There's also a more existential problem for tv. The most vibrant Gen Z comedy right now isn't on TV at all. It's playing on TikTok and YouTube where 22 year olds and ate. They're dating disaster Roommate betrayals and quarter life freakouts directly to millions of followers. The creator economy didn't just steal young viewers' attention. It stole their genre for this generation. The funniest shows about being young are made by people their own age on their own phones. In formats that evolve by the hour, overcompensating, an adult found audiences. Each series hit the top 10 on Prime Video and Hulu. but neither cracked Nielsen's streaming charts and were given second season renewals eventually. But a senior exec at a separate platform tells me that the broad youth ensemble is trickier at the moment. So tricky. It might not even be worth targeting no matter how desirable the 18 To 34 demo remains for advertisers. I have to interject here. I have never heard so tricky. It might not be worth targeting, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I am not surprised that there is no name attached to that quote. oh, it goes on. Everything is cyclical. The development executive says, but I don't see in the short term that I'm telling the creative community that I'm looking for a young ensemble as the prototype of what we're trying to do next. Okay, I am skipping and scanning. even on shows that feature young characters, they often are moved to the background. Astro's Stumble is based on the Netflix docuseries chair, which ended up making household names out of small town college athletes. Still, Astro says he and his sister, co-writer Liz Astro, were directed to drive the story towards. Adult characters. This is partly because the show tested well with older audiences ahead of its premiere. He added it now, follows the Reba McIntyre sitcom Happy Places on NBC's Friday Night Lineup. And the hope is to build a connection for those viewers who still want to watch linear TV on the primetime schedule. He notes that the push pull to highlight one demo while also trying for broad appeal isn't new, especially on broadcast. Back in the nineties when Don Meyer ran NBC, he was worried that friends was too young. Astro recalls. So the writers developed an older character named Pat, the cop, who was supposed to ground the group. Pat never had to report for duty. When I asked Astro if he thinks things would be different, if Stumble had premiered on Peacock or if the kids could become the breakout characters. As they did with Fox's Glee, Astro laughs and said, if I could answer any of those questions, I'd be retired. When I asked NBC Universal's head of scripted comedy development, Jeff Myerson, the same question about stumble. He said, NBCU is looking for shows with broad appeal for the biggest possible audience regardless of the platform, the difference between NBC and Peacock isn't their targets. He continues, but rather the storytelling and how it aligns with cadence And viewing habits on broadcast appointment tv, more episodes versus streaming shorter seasons on demand. When we're developing with creators, it's much more about the urgency of storytelling on peacock versus on broadcast. He says, we feel like there's more of a rhythm to having the St. Dennis medicals or the stumbles of the world having a higher episode count where you can fall in love with these characters and it's much more episodic by nature. Lots of pixels have been spilled over how self-involved friends sex since were or why Neil? Patrick Harris's Barney on How I Met your mother was problematic actually in the 2010s with more female led stories like Fox Hulu's, the Mindy Project, Fox's new Girl and ABCs don't trust the B. In apartment 23, the narcissism became more self-aware and Unapologetic. The Bee was the first show that Nka Khan got on the air as a creator premiering in 2012. It was a dark and sardonic program about a fresh off the boat, Ingenue, dream walker's. June, who moves in with a manipulative roommate, Kristin Ritter's, Chloe. There are so many reasons why this show shouldn't have worked, from it's very title to a scene in the pilot where Chloe gets a kid drunk. But Con 52 says she had the full blessing of Paul Lee, then the president of a BC Entertainment. He's now the CEO of Wip and himself a bit of an outlier in the industry, the B only lasted two seasons. Okay. I wasn't quite sure what WIP was and it's pretty huge. This is what their website says. WIP is a global, independent studio, distinctive in its talent first approach by inspiring storytellers to do what they love create led by entertainment veteran Paul Lee Whips. Critically acclaimed premium slate includes Brad Ingle, be's Emmy Award-winning limited series, mayor of East Town, which I loved starring Kate Winslet, as well as his new prestige drama series task starring Mark Ruffalo. Oh, I did not know that. task was from the creator of Mayor of East Town. So now I will watch it and it goes on and on. They did Dickens for HBO with Haley Seinfeld and the summer I turned pretty for Prime video and tons more. A new year brings new writing goals and I am committed to finishing my True Crime memoir in 2026. I've been working on this book for years, and we all know that the details you jot down in January tend to become fuzzy by June I wish I had Novem our sponsor. A fantastic writing tool that quickly turns chaos into clear well organized stories When I started writing. whether you write directly on no vellum or upload an existing draft, your characters and setting details, timeline, events, and plot pacing are automatically pulled from your story to view at a glance and in real time. Noum catches the problems you'd miss on your own, like plot tangles, pacing issues. continuity errors. Even character Logic slips. Noum isn't another AI content generator. It never shares your data. Instead, Noum keeps you in control through every stage of your writing process. It's your text editor, character files, continuity checker, and more in one organized lightning fast platform. You can even use Noum to share your work securely with beta readers and keep track of their comments. Don't wait until your draft is finished. Get the most out of your writing this year Try Novem today and get your first month free. Using my special code hangout, go to N-O-V-E-L-I-U-M-S. O, that's N-O-V-E-L-I-U-M, so don't forget to use the special code Hangout and get one month free. Back to the article last year, Khan and Sally Branford McKenna created Laid for peacock, adapted from an Australian format. It has a procedural structure. Each episode randomly kills off a former paramore of its lead, the 30 something event planner, Ruby Stephanie Shoe. The humor of laid for that specific audience is you wanted to take something relatable and familiar. This girl just can't find the one she's been searching for, and then bring in this sort of heightened element of people start dying one by one. Kahan says, in a way, don't trust the bee. Also had that heightened element for the same target audience. Leid was released as a binge watch in December and canceled after one season. Debbie Lie, blings Storied producing career includes several years in comedy development at Comedy Central, where she was instrumental in shepherding. then Unknowns, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's South Park. Liebling blames the dearth of edgy young adult focused comedies on the devise of cable. That is glutted. Platforms like Comedy Central and TBS once staffed by young execs looking to nurture and develop young talent and stories for young skewing audiences. People try to plan on having heads, but hits happened by throwing the net wide and taking some chances. She says, adding that pen 15 went under the radar. At Hulu because executives were focused on more Expensive projects. this gave it time to find its niche audience, a millennials nostalgic for the days of crushes and algebra. So often people are afraid of diverting from what they think people want lie bling says. But she also concedes that for a show to grab new audiences now Requires something that is so viral to get that kind of commitment. So is it that young adults aren't watching tv or that they're just not watching what the industry is selling? 57% of tweens, teens and young adults watch TV and movies more than older generations think they do. The Center for Scholars and Storytellers, CS. S at UCA found in its annual Teens and Screens report released in October. They're increasingly interested in content With relatable stories more than fantasy and real world issues, or aspiration stories. And 61% of those surveyed would rather see romantic relationships that depict a friendship between a couple, not just sex. Wait. I don't know if I believe that. I can't remember the last time I saw a young adult in front of the tv. Can you writers Over 10 years ago. It could have even been 15 years ago. I remember asking my friend's son where the remote was. I was over their place and He just shrugged his shoulders and said he had no idea. I joked with his mom when I was his age, I knew where the remote was at every moment of the day. she said that he'd watch reruns with her, like Seinfeld's. But other than that, he doesn't turn the TV on. so I don't know. Back to the article, Both adults and I love LA have sex scenes. So does overcompensating while Abbott Elementary keeps things pretty g rate. But intimate relationships aren't the a storyline. The friend groups are also an intersectional mix of genders, races, and sexual orientations. Without making any of these things really an issue, everyone is woke, even if they hate that word's connotation. And characters are aware of their privilege, that true Whitakers Alani is the wealthy daughter of a famous actor, runs as an undercurrent on I love LA And adults doesn't really engage with how much longer the group can go on Living Rent Free in Sam Mar's Family Home. both shows also lean into the fact that young people are just inevitably conceited and narcissistic jerks on. I Love La Odessa Zion's Influencer Tall Lula has phone sex in her friend's bed on adult Owen and Amita become convinced they caused their shared therapist to end their life. He actually slipped in the shower. we always say they're not good people. Adults, co-creator Shaw says, but they're getting there. Writers, what do you think did me reading this article to you? Was it helpful in any way? Did it inspire you? spark any new ideas? If you are not aiming for a specific audience and just want to tell your story, that is fantastic. Nothing is holding you back, and you should put your main focus on that At the same time though, staying informed about what's happening in the entertainment industry can be incredibly helpful for any writer, even if you're not chasing fame. It provides valuable insight into the current market, evolving trends and practical tips for getting your work and produce and sold. And that's a wrap for the Writer's Hangout. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your positive feedback will help us keep the show going so we can continue bringing you more future episodes. Remember, keep writing. The world needs your stories. The Writers Hangout is sponsored by the Page International Screenwriting Awards, with executive producer Kristen Overn, Sandy Adamides, and myself, Terry Sampson. And our music is composed by Ethan Stoller.