Since the dawn of Facebook albums, millennials have been cursed with an omnipresent fear of being “cringe” online. The trait itself is strangely intangible — not necessarily defined by something you can see, hear, or even reliably identify through social cues, but by a deep, intrinsic feeling that you have tried too hard, and therefore been earnestly, painfully uncool.

Lately, we’re told that cringe is “back.” You can’t scroll without being inundated with relics of 2016: hazy nostalgia reels soundtracked to Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen,” once the undisputed anthem of the year. That era is being romanticized as a time when we felt truly free — the final days of Obama’s America, blissfully unaware of macros, when Coachella flower crowns, ripped denim shorts, and American Apparel still reigned. And yet, I remember 2016. By then, we had already outlawed “share anything” social media and were steadily embracing a more curated online presence. Overearnest young upstarts were being eviscerated in every plotline of Girls. We collectively shuddered at Katy Perry’s “Left Shark” during the 2015 Super Bowl.

Then came the full-force arrival of get-ready-with-me influencers and ten-second TikTok dances. In 2020, I remember asking a friend how TikTok could possibly continue when all of us were simply too cringed out to post anything at all. “You have to climb cringe mountain to get to cool,” he told me. Even so, it would be years before I started posting consistently myself.

In 2016, Rachel Sennott was attending NYU’s Tisch School, performing at open mic nights around New York City, and auditioning for improv groups — one of which famously rejected both her and Ayo Edebiri. Critics often cite her breakout moment as Shiva Baby, where she played a conflicted Jewish college student sleeping with her professor. But it was arguably a TikTok — one that parodied the hollow affect of Los Angeles culture — that most memorably put her on the map. It was, in essence, sketch comedy. And had it not taken off, it likely would have been dismissed as cringe.

It’s ironic, or perhaps inevitable, that years later Sennott would create a show about living in Los Angeles and trying to make it within the attention economy of the internet. She feels particularly at home as Maia, an aspiring talent agent perpetually on the back foot, struggling to keep pace with the high-fliers of Hollywood — especially as she measures herself against her very cool, very successful influencer friend. I Love LA is cringe comedy in its purest form: laugh-out-loud funny and deeply wince-inducing, especially for anyone who sees their own anxieties reflected in its characters, whether or not they actually live in Los Angeles.

But for much of the past decade, shows willing to satirize youth culture in ways that felt this raw — and occasionally hard to stomach — have been few and far between. It’s hard not to attribute that absence to our collective aversion to cringe. While Girls is now regarded as a cult classic, it was once relentlessly scrutinized for how “in on the joke” it really was. Were its characters exaggerated caricatures of middle-class, self-unaware white women, or were they simply self-unaware white women moving through the world exactly as its creator, Lena Dunham, might?

In response, scripted television swung in the opposite direction. Comedy grew safer; drama grew heavier. Dramedies became more brooding than pie-in-the-face funny (Only Murders in the Building, The White Lotus, The Good Place), while shows like The Bear were inexplicably filed under “comedy.” It wasn’t until half-hour series like The Other Two and Hacks that we cautiously dipped our toes back into cringe. Even then, the reception was a little hesitant. The Other Two ran quietly for several seasons before being abruptly canceled. Initially, Hacks audiences took their time finding the show, though the overwhelmingly positive critical and commercial reception eventually cleared the runway for high-octane, industry-skewering comedies like The Studio.

With I Love LA, we return to a mode that feels both familiar and newly radical: laughing at ourselves. Watching Girls’ Marnie perform a Kanye West cover for a room full of strangers was almost unbearable in real time. Now, we look back on her with a kind of fondness — much the same way we do Maia and her striving cohort who keep getting everything wrong in their effort to ascend the social strata. Somewhere along the way, we stopped taking ourselves quite so seriously and remembered that very little is truly high stakes. And if we’re going to welcome back 2016 in all her overwrought, hyper-perceived, Valencia-filter glory, we might as well do it with a Rachel Sennott cackle.