HBO Max's I LOVE LA: An 8th Grader's 28-Year-Old Married Boyfriend!

Here’s HBO Max’s synopsis for I Love LA:

A codependent, ambitious friend group navigates life and love in Los Angeles [...]

One of the members of the friend group is Alani Marcus (True Whitaker). Alani’s dad owns Darcy Avenue Productions, a television production company, where Alani is the VP of Creative Projects; however, Alani confessed that the title was fake and was given to her by her dad. 

On season 01 episode 02 (2025), while visiting her dad's production company, Alani accidentally walked into a meeting, where ideas for a new TV show, “kinda like a Gen Z Clueless” “about growing up in LA [...] set in a private school”, were being discussed. 

Alani stated that she went to Crossroads, a private school in LA, and that she had, “[...] so many amazing stories.” 

Alani was asked to share, “Any specific stories you have about [...] your first kiss in a convertible.” Consequently, Alani shared that when she was an (approximately 13-year-old) 8th-grade private school student, she had a 28-year-old boyfriend named Ryan. Apparently, Alani’s classmates knew about Ryan, because they were jealous of Alani, because Ryan was “so cute”. Not only did Ryan possess jealously inducing good looks, he had a wife and an exhausting child. However, to Alani’s dismay, her age-gap affair ended after Ryan’s wife discovered Alani’s texts, but to console Alani, her father gifted her a convertible. 

Alanis said, “I had my first boyfriend in eighth grade. His name was Ryan. He was so cute. Everyone was, like, so jealous. Yeah, so for our first date, we went to Katsuya Brentwood and got the Omakase [...] Ryan drove us. He was 28. He was a really good driver, but he was always so exhausted ‘cause of his newborn [...] but then his wife, like, found our texts and, like, made him move back to the east coast with her family. That was so sad, because he had to go. My dad got me a convertible! So that's, that's our convertible story, right there.”

Alani reminded me of Joshua Gaylor's Hummingbirds. In the novel, Mrs. Landry, the headmistress at Carmine-Casey, a prep school in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue and Central Park, shared with Mr. Binhammer, an English teacher, that she: “[...] got a call from a parent just two weeks ago giving her ninth-grade daughter permission to leave school when her boyfriend, who is a freshman in college, came to pick her up in his car.”

And the photo in the HBO Max app for I Love LA reminded me of the photo that was posted in the app for Pretty Little Liars: Summer School.

Lastly, critics gave I Love LA an 84% average Tomatometer score. And Nicholas Quah, a Vulture, opined in his post "I Love LA Is Young, Dumb, and Full of Fun" (Nov. 2, 2025) that the series is: "[...] a comedy that’s both precise and unhinged, absurdly funny yet emotionally true [...]"