Hellish L.A.

Welcome to Hell-A. That'll be $18 for your beer. What do you want, we're still fixing up from the last quake.

Fry: But there was this gang of 10-year-olds with guns.

Leela: Exactly, you're in L.A.

Fry: But everyone is driving around in cars shooting at each other.

Bender: That's L.A. for you.

Fry: But the air is green and there's no sign of civilization whatsoever.

Bender: He just won't stop with the social commentary.

— Futurama, "The Cryonic Woman"

For the full effect, play this as you read the page.

So you think New York City is too dirty, crowded, gray, and mean, and have decided to move to sunny Los Angeles to get away from it all. Well, it looks like you've jumped Out of the Frying Pan and into the fire. How's that working out for you?

Hellish L.A. (or, as it's sometimes cheekily called, Hell-A^note A pun on both the city's acronym and "hella", a slang term that originated in California, albeit further north) is the West Coast version of The Big Rotten Apple and the dark side of Hollywood California, a depiction of Los Angeles as a hellhole. The sky is colored by an ominous orange haze thanks to exhaust from the millions of cars sitting bumper-to-bumper on one of the city's many fine freeways, ensuring that you will be late to wherever you have to go. If you wanna beat the traffic by taking the train, tough — they've been talking about building mass transit for decades now, and every time, it goes nowhere both literally and figuratively. Nature? Ha! They lined their largest river in concrete and paved everything else over with suburban sprawl.

As for the people, Gangbangers rule everywhere south of the 10, and you're probably pressing your luck if you travel east of Downtown, too, especially if you don't have an English-to-Spanish dictionary on hand at all times. Homeless camps line the streets and cluster beneath every overpass. The police respond to all this by being uniquely trigger-happy and racist even by the standards of other police departments, at least when they're not getting a piece of the action themselves (which isn't mutually exclusive). The rich and the middle class aren't any better, most of them being vain, phony, trend-chasing jerks who wear plastic smiles as they stab you in the back, while what passes for "culture" is a pale mockery of what you'd find on the East Coast (let alone Europe). After all, Hollywood is one of the city's neighborhoods, as that sign in the hills overlooking the city always reminds you. Lots of people moved here to become stars, those who didn't make it in "the Industry" are still bitter, and they will happily take it out on you.

Oh, and it's all sitting on a network of fault lines that's gonna plunge it into the ocean one day, and when it does, the rest of the country will cheer. That is, if the wildfires don't destroy it first.

Unlike the outward, in-your-face awfulness of the Big Rotten Apple, Hellish L.A. may sometimes be the kind that sneaks up on you, a Crapsaccharine World in which all that stuff is heightened by the contrast to the beautiful weather and scenery around you, with those awful jerks living in fancy homes in the rich neighborhoods and driving luxury sports cars that you can't afford. A Hellish L.A. story doesn't necessarily have to take place in the seedier parts of town or depict Los Angeles as a Vice City; all it has to do is present it as a generally undesirable place to be, and its inhabitants as uniquely obnoxious and terrible, even if you're in the nicer part of town.

Much like Los Angeles itself, this trope arose more recently than its New York counterpart. Depictions of the city as a Wretched Hive go back to the postwar period from The '40s through The '70s. In depictions from this era or hearkening back to it, one can expect a Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy, led by either The Mafia or the Kosher Nostra (or both of them as allies), to be the ones running the city, controlling both the public and private sectors thanks to them owning numerous businesses and having many a Corrupt Politician and Dirty Cop on their payroll.

This trope really took off, however, in The '80s, when the crack epidemic brought about the national rise of LA-based street gangs like the Crips and the Bloods. This marked the beginning of a period of simmering tensions that would characterize the city for much of The '90s, a decade when its public image was shaped by Gangsta Rap, the Rodney King riots, the O. J. Simpson trial, and the Rampart scandal. The old image of the city as "America's largest small town", a land of idyllic, picturesque ranch homes and wholesome family values for miles (and a bunch of Hollyweirdos next door), was blown up beyond repair, and with New York and other Northeastern cities recovering from the blight of the '70s and '80s, Los Angeles replaced them as the face of urban decay in the '90s. What's more, Hollywood, especially from The '70s onward, has always had a reputation as a hotbed of cultural radicalism, a reputation that rubbed off on the rest of the city and (with help from San Francisco) the state of California as a whole, giving Angelenos a reputation as just weird in the eyes of the rest of the country.

A lot of this trope's prevalence has to do with how the American film industry, and much of the nation's television industry, is based out of Los Angeles, meaning that many screenwriters are writing from experience about all the little things about the city that just bug them. New York, the other major center of the American entertainment industry, has also long had a fierce rivalry with Los Angeles and California in general going back to The '50s when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants baseball teams moved to LA and San Francisco, respectively, so TV shows and movies produced there are also likely to make fun of the city, typically with a bit less affection.

Note that, while there is quite a bit of overlap with Horrible Hollywood on account of their shared location, such that they often go hand-in-hand, there is an important distinction. That is about negative portrayals of the entertainment industry (and doesn't necessarily have to be set in LA), while this is about the rest of the city. Rule of thumb: if the entertainment industry is the main source of misery for a character in Los Angeles, you're talking about Horrible Hollywood. If it's the rest of the city, you're talking about Hellish L.A.

A common setting for Sunshine Noir. Subtrope of Place Worse Than Death. The Big Rotten Apple is its New York counterpart. See also Hollywood California for non-hellish depictions of Los Angeles.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• Angel (IDW): picking up directly from the end of the TV series (see below), in which Los Angeles is literally sent to Hell. It's not a subtle take on this trope.
• Judge Dredd had Mega-City Two as the LA-based counterpart to Mega-City One, to which it was often contrasted. While MC-1 was located on the East Coast and based on its polluted, crime-ridden cities (New York especially), MC-2 was portrayed as having much nicer weather and an ocean that wasn't toxic, though its culture was, if anything, even more decadent and depraved than MC-1's, complete with Deadly Games being legal and the entertainment industry being so powerful that refugees were only allowed in if the studios could find roles for them as extras. It eventually got nuked into oblivion after a Zombie Apocalypse destroyed it.
• In Runaways, Los Angeles is the squatting ground for the Gibborim, a trio of fallen angels who intend to wipe out all of humanity. To this end, they installed the Pride, a cult-like criminal organization that performs human sacrifices in exchange for being given the resources to corrupt every significant organization in the city (this is also the canonical explanation for why every West Coast/LA-based superteam or hero in the Marvel Universe up to this point hasn't lasted very long). Even after the Pride are defeated, the city is still a mess, crawling with supervillains and the odd supernatural monster.

Films — Live-Action

• Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), in which a street gang besieges a police station in one of LA's worst ghettoes.
• Black Scorpion effectively is Roger Corman's take on Batman done on a lower budget and with a blatant expy of Los Angeles. The Mayor is a self-entitled jerk, the police don't even try to claim they're of any use and the only one who can stop it is a Stripperific knock-off of Batgirl. The TV series even got Adam West and Frank Gorshin to join in the fun while cranking up the camp aspects...
• Blade Runner:
  • The first film codified the image of a Cyberpunk Mega City, and it used a near-future Los Angeles to do so. In 2019, LA is a constantly dark and rainy city with tensions between humans and replicants, controlled by big corporations.
  • The sequel Blade Runner 2049 shows that things have become worse in the last 30 years, with rising sea levels, weird weather that includes snow, and its outskirts, one of them formerly known as San Diego, now being giant landfills.
• Blast from the Past: In 1962, a paranoid Los Angeles man puts his family in a bunker for 35 years, believing that World War III is imminent and that anyone who remains above will become disfigured by the radiation. Ascending in 1997, he finds that the neighborhood has gone to hell and is full of odd-looking and hostile punks, and concludes that his prediction about mutants was worse than he could have imagined.
• Chinatown depicts early 20th century Los Angeles as a Crapsack World full of anti-Jewish and anti-Asian sentiment, in which Domestic Abuse is a fact of life and there is a massive conspiracy going on headed by child rapist Noah Cross to "control the future" through Los Angeles's water supply. And, at the end, he wins. Evelyn is killed for trying to take her Child by Rape away from Cross, Cross takes her away, and Jake ends up despondent.
• The opening of Demolition Man depicts LA as a borderline post-apocalyptic wasteland overrun by street gangs that the police need military-grade firepower to put down. The rest of the film is set 20 Minutes into the Future in a rebuilt "San Angeles" that has gone all the way in the other direction in literally burying its past, to the point of becoming a Crapsaccharine World.
• Die Hard used this in juxtaposing the protagonist John McClane's blue-collar, straight-talking New York attitude with the rich jerks he encounters in LA, not least of all the other guests at the party. When he's greeted at Nakatomi Plaza by a man who gives him a European-style platonic kiss on the cheek, all he can say is "Jesus, fuckin' California!"
• Escape from L.A., following in the footsteps of Escape from New York's use of The Big Rotten Apple, is set 20 Minutes into the Future after an earthquake cuts LA off from the rest of the US, leading to the rise of a far-right theocratic President who turns the city's ruins into a prison island for anybody who dissents from his "Moral America". Among its inhabitants are a cult based out of Beverly Hills that's obsessed with plastic surgery.
• Falling Down is about a man who, already at the end of his rope, hits his Rage Breaking Point during a traffic jam on the Los Angeles freeway during a Heat Wave and proceeds to go on a rampage across the city. Along the way, he frequently encounters many of LA's worst stereotypes, from a cheapskate Asian Store-Owner to a Latino street gang to the staff of a fast-food joint to the neo-Nazi owner of a military surplus store.
• Gangster Squad: Thanks to Mickey Cohen and his criminal empire, the city of Los Angeles post-WWII has become a crime-infested hellhole. Cohen's goons run amok, many businesses are either fronts for illegal activity or run by one of Cohen's associates, and many of LA's finest are Dirty Cops on Cohen's payroll. The main characters establish their titular squad as a way to take down Cohen by waging guerilla warfare, with them acting as part La Résistance, part Vigilante Man crew completely free of any corrupt police or politicians.
• Los Angeles was a popular setting for many Hood Films in the '90s, focused specifically on the experience of growing up poor and Black in South Central. Boyz n the Hood, Menace II Society, and (of course) South Central are some of the big ones, all of them about young men from that part of the city who get sucked into a cycle of gang violence.
• J-Men Forever was made in The '70s, so the gags regarding L.A are all about its smog. Fortunately superhero Rocket Jock is told to "disregard your personal feelings about the city" and save it.
• The Naked Gun: Done twice in the third movie:
  • When Frank and Rocko escape from prison, they emerge outside an LA high school. Every student there promptly pulls out a gun and starts shooting at the pair.
  • A later establishing shot of LA depicts sirens wailing, guns firing, and the Hollywood sign on fire.
• The Neon Demon: Jesse moves to Los Angeles to kickstart her career as a model. She's surrounded by perverted men who try to take advantage of or outright rape her and gets sucked into a coven who kill her for her youth (after trying to rape her in Ruby's case), eat her, and then appear to get away with everything.
• In The Nice Guys, a porn star turns up dead, a girl is missing, LA is the main setting for a catalytic converter conspiracy (headed by Department of Justice bigwig Judith Kuttner, Amelia is offhandedly murdered, and a whole host of hitmen and women come after Amelia, Healy, and March as a result.
• Prayer Of The Rollerboys: In a dystopian near-future following an economic meltdown, Los Angeles is plagued by crime, poverty, and drug abuse, leading to the rise of a white supremacist rollerblading narcogang that wants to use tainted drugs to sterilize America's junkies and allow the "pure" to rebuild America in their image.
• In the near-future of Predator 2, gang violence in LA has gotten so bad that a Predator decided that the city's heavily-armed cops and criminals would make Worthy Opponents for his hunt. It's telling that almost everyone on a subway train is carrying a handgun; however, when everyone draws their weapon to stop an armed robbery in progress, the City Hunter Predator accepts this as a challenge.
• Strange Days: Set in a "futuristic" Los Angeles on the eve of the year 2000, the city is on a knife edge after the slaying of rapper Jeriko One. Los Angeles is on the verge of breaking out into a citywide riot over the news, especially after evidence turns up showing that the rapper was killed by two LAPD officers because of his anti-police lyrics and activism. The lead protagonists have to simultaneously prevent the dirty cops from trying up loose ends and keep the evidence from leaking to the public and starting a riot.
• Training Day is about a rookie police officer being taken for a ride-along by a Dirty Cop through the city's roughest neighborhoods, based heavily on the Rampart scandal that exposed widespread corruption within the Los Angeles Police Department.
• Under the Silver Lake: Sam is a talentless, directionless "screenwriter" in LA, who prefers mistreating and sleeping around with various blonde women (most of them none too bright). A serial dog killer is on the loose; Millicent is fatally shot in a swimming pool; mini-cults seem to have sprung up everywhere as excuses to abuse women; there's an entire conspiracy to turn the banalest music into supposedly life-changing "art", and the target of Sam's obsession, Sarah joined a cult of rich and powerful Los Angeles men who are so bored and disillusioned with life that they've walled themselves up underground to starve to death in order to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.

Literature

• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: In a world where the Greek gods are real and shifted locations as the center of Western civilization changed from Ancient Greece to the modern-day United States, the gate to the Underworld — the Greek myth equivalent to Hell — is now posing as a record company in L.A. The record label name? DOA (Dead on Arrival) Records.
• You (Kepnes):
  • Though they live in New York, Beck tells Joe just before he kills her that she wants to move to L.A. and become an actress. This is the tipping point for Joe when he "realizes" Beck is a narcissist who was never worthy of being the target of his obsession.
  • In the sequel Hidden Bodies, Joe detests Los Angeles, where he moves only in an effort to find Amy Adam (who stole a rare book from him to fund her career). Except for Love, every person he meets there is either dumb and shallow (Delilah), fame-hungry and assholish (Forty), or actively corrupt (Fincher, a police officer who's obsessed with celebrities and keeps a logbook of those he meets, and Henderson, a miserable comedian).
• Very much the point of Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero, where LA is pretty much ground zero for the most amoral of the 1980s party scene. Its sequel Imperial Bedrooms is more Horrible Hollywood.

Live-Action TV

• A frequent subject on Angel was that, while Sunnydale was built atop a Hellmouth, it was LA that was the real hell on Earth, whether it was the aspiring actress Cordelia's experiences with Horrible Hollywood and struggles to find a decent apartment, Gunn's upbringing in South Central, or the vast amount of creeps and freaks they crossed paths with in the City of Angels. In the Series Finale, it literally got sent to Hell.
  Spike: (having just died on BTVS and resurrected on Angel): Am I in hell?
  Lorne: No, L.A. But a lot of people make that mistake.
• Barry: The series is set in Los Angeles and just about every single character is a scumbag of some kind, showing the dark side of both the entertainment industry and the criminal underground of the city.
• Boomtown (2002) is a cop show that highlights a multitude of issues in Los Angeles, with (at least some) corrupt police, masses of crime, a DA who's slowly spiraling into alcoholism, and a crumbling infrastructure that causes massive traffic jams.
• Dragnet: From season three onward, the series sees a marked increase in violent crimes, and the By-the-Book Cop Joe Friday faces off against more and more corrupt cops. Bear in mind that this series was proud of saying that it based its plot lines on real LAPD case files.
• It's Like, You Know... is about a New York writer named Arthur Garment writing an exposé on the excesses and folly of Los Angeles, but his publisher insists that he should, y'know, visit LA at some point before submitting his final draft. This is the excuse for our Only Sane Man to immerse himself in wacky sitcom hijinks with a bunch of Orange County weirdos.
• Penny Dreadful: City of Angels is a mixing bowl of all the worst of LA in the period between the two World Wars, capturing the rise of American Nazism, race riots, endemic LAPD corruption, and ethnic Latin neighborhoods being cleared out to make room for the oncoming freeway system. If that weren't enough, the Devil and Santa Muerte are battling it out, but that's mainly just balanced against the room tone.
• Snowfall starts off with Los Angeles struggling with police brutality and gang violence. Over the next few seasons, it gets worse, as a covert CIA operation pumps cocaine into the city in order to raise funds for Iran-Contra. Things take a particular turn for the worse at the end of season 3, where Franklin Saint, the city's largest player in the cocaine trade, is shot and incapacitated, creating a power vacuum at the same time that the police are stretched thin for the 1984 Summer Olympics, creating the perfect conditions for an ugly gang war.
• You (2018): Joe moves to L.A. to try and find Candace. While Forty is more heroic than the book, he's still a coddled Manchild, Henderson is given an upgrade to the point where he sexually abuses multiple young women and girls and is nevertheless extremely famous, the Quinn parents are hands-off bohemian millionaires who let Forty be sexually abused, and Love is a murderer.

Music

• Bad Religion are a punk band from LA who have written many songs on the subject. The cover for their second album How Could Hell Be Any Worse? is a red and black photo of central Los Angeles.
• Bowling for Soup: "I Can't Stand L.A." is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, a song about how much the band loves a variety of cities, but can't stand Los Angeles due to things like pollution, road rage, and "the threat of breaking off into the sea". They do, however, have a section about giving the "benefit of the doubt", and point out positives like the good sushi, the city's diversity, and the hot women.
• As noted in many places on this page, Gangsta Rap was huge in Los Angeles in The '90s, one of the genre's two largest hubs during that time alongside New York. Lots of songs were written about the state of the city's working-class neighborhoods, many of them containing specific Take Thats to real-life city officials, institutions, and public figures.
• Many of Hollywood Undead's songs are about how LA chews up and spits out everybody who tries to make it there, luring them in with false promises of glamour before destroying them, unless they're willing to sell their souls to get ahead.
• Randy Newman's "I Love L.A." The title is meant to be sarcastic, juxtaposing Los Angeles' image of glamour and excess (and an upbeat tune) with the sight of a homeless man begging for change. It also namedrops the hot Santa Ana winds, which in reality are extremely unpleasant, and the four streets he names at the end of the song were at the time notorious for gang violence. Regardless, many Angelenos embraced the song as an unofficial self-deprecating anthem, especially after it was featured in a Nike ad campaign for the 1984 Summer Olympics, and Newman has stated that he meant the lyrics to be ambiguous as to whether he was praising or insulting the city.
• The below-mentioned Bill Hicks routine is given an extended Shout-Out in the tool song "Ænema", complete with a mention of Arizona Bay at the end of the chorus.
• The song "Los Angeles" by X (US Band) qualifies at least from the point of view of the song's viewpoint character, a woman fleeing the city due to the presence of blacks, Mexicans, homosexuals, and rich people. The song's chorus is simply "She had to get out/get out/get out/get out/get out/get oooooout..."
• Bran Van 3000's song "Drinking in L.A." is equally split between Horrible Hollywood (the bits about the narrator's go-nowhere screenwriting career) and Hellish L.A. (the bits about being mocked and threatened by strangers for no clear reason).

Stand-up Comedy

• A major subject of the Bill Hicks album Arizona Bay is his hatred of Los Angeles, especially its weather (or lack thereof) and its status as a cultural wasteland responsible for the dumbing down of America due to the vapid movies and TV shows Hollywood churns out; the title of that album is his desire to see the city fall into the ocean, leaving nothing behind but a new body of water he'd call "Arizona Bay".

Tabletop Games

• Deadlands has a Weird West spin on the trope with the Great Maze. Formerly the state of California, when Raven unleashed his Reckoning, a massive earthquake struck the state and sent it plunging into the sea, leaving behind only a labyrinth of mesas sticking out of the churning waters. At the same time, it's America's largest known depository of the ubiquitous superfuel known as Ghost Rock, so it has become a hotbed for miners and everybody hoping to profit off of the miners. Rough weather and extreme heat are compounded with limited access to food and water, which drives the prices up sky high, and that's before you get into the weirder dangers, like the Maze's water being infested with Sea Serpents and Channel Chompers. The city of Lost Angels is a theocratic nation-state being run by a fanatical yet charismatic cult leader called Reverend Grimes. And in fact he's a powerful monster devoted to the Horseman of Famine, his "holy enforcers" are Black Magic-using cultists, and the "free meals" he dishes out to entice people to pledge allegiance to him are largely made up of human flesh, with Grimes even sabotaging supply deliveries to try and pressure more people into joining his cannibal cult.
• As mentioned under Video Games, Vampire: The Masquerade made LA the seat of the Anarch Free States, with Anarch leader Jeremy MacNeil deposing Camarilla prince Don Sebastian after one too many abuses. However, MacNeil is such an Anarch that the city has no real body of government beyond a Revolutionary Council, meaning it's mainly a free-for-all between various Anarch gangs. If that's not enough, the founding of the city is tied to an extremely powerful 13-year-old Toreador who was laughed out of Boston for being an artless poseur; not only is he the reason Hollywood became the entertainment capital of the world, but it's strongly implied he decides the course of LA's greater political structure based on who's the subject of his latest daddy crush (this element has been downplayed in later editions because the idea of a vampire in eternal puberty has gone from "disturbing" to "uncomfortably icky").
  • And what's the one thing that could make LA more hellish in the World of Darkness? Lucifer decided to make a very public appearance there, and thus, a lot of demons started showing up after the gates to the Abyss flung open.
• Shadowrun has had Los Angeles go through it over the editions. At first, when California split off from the US, the damage was limited, with race riots in the lower-income neighborhoods of Compton, Gardena, and Hawthorne resulting in the city going "Screw this" and walling them off as the heavily-guarded "El Infierno." Decades later, an offshore reactor explodes and floods the city with a toxic wave; El Infierno gets no help, which leads to a group of local hackers getting revenge the next year by wiping the results of the California Free State's gubernatorial election. This leads to the CFS sending in the army; a massacre occurs, and the city is basically written off by the state for years until another earthquake hits, with the Pueblo Corporate Council finally stepping in to annex it. And if that weren't enough, the city then gets hit with a massive earthquake and ensuing tidal wave that sees vast chunks south of the 101 still flooded years later (in part because it also revealed magical tunnels under the city that literally seem to have appeared out of nowhere). On top of all of that, the city is so obsessed with fame and social media that most runners effectively livestream their criminal activities under false identities.

Theatre

• The Show Within a Show in City of Angels is a Film Noir about the seedy side of life in Los Angeles. (The outer story is an equally cynical portrayal of Horrible Hollywood.) Stone's Private Eye Monologue sums it up near the beginning:
  "Three million people in the City of Angels according to the last census, easily half of them up to something they don't want the other half to know. We all get sucked in by the lobby. Palm trees finger the sky and there's enough sunshine to lay some off on Pittsburgh. But that's all on top. L.A., truth to tell's, not much different than a pretty girl with the clap."

Video Games

• Bad Day L.A.: The game casts you as a homeless man named Anthony Williams in the city of Los Angeles, a former talent agent who got fed up with the bullshit he encountered in his job and quit in spectacular fashion. Over the course of the game, the city is hit with one massive disaster after another, from a plane crash releasing a zombie virus to an earthquake to a tsunami to whatever else the game feels like destroying it with. By the end of the game, the city is in complete ruins. It is not subtle in its parody of both Los Angeles and 2000s American culture, with the people portrayed as every stereotype of the city, from airheaded celebrities to gung-ho soldiers to Mexican day laborers who are actually infiltrators sent to retake LA for Mexico.
• Cyberpunk 2077: Night City isn't technically Los Angeles, being a planned city located up the coast at the site of present-day Morro Bay, but visually, large parts of the city are as inspired by this trope as you can get without it actually being LA. Rancho Coronado resembles the decaying suburban slums of South Central, Pacifica is a former vacation resort reminiscent of Santa Monica that's since been taken over by gangs, North Oak is a wealthy neighborhood of luxurious mansions in the hills overlooking the city that resembles the Hollywood Hills (complete with its own Mock Hollywood Sign), and the deserts and dusty towns surrounding the city almost resemble a Standard Post-Apocalyptic Setting. Other elements of Night City, though, lean more towards an Americasia influence, as befitting a cyberpunk story where Japan Takes Over the World.
• Dead Island 2 outright uses "See You in Hell-A" as its tagline, and much of the marketing material leans heavily on this in its depiction of Los Angeles getting overrun by zombies. The very first trailer shows a handsome hunk jogging down the Venice Beach boardwalk, oblivious to the chaos around him, before succumbing to the bite on his wrist and turning into a zombie, the rot revealing that his hair (a toupee) and his muscles (silicone implants) are fake.
• Dead Rising 3 is set in a fictionalized version of LA called Los Perdidos, which has been overrun by a Zombie Apocalypse. Throughout the game, many of the Psychopaths you encounter, all of them based on the Seven Deadly Sins, are also based on stereotypical LA characters, with Pride represented by a bodybuilder, Greed by a plastic surgeon, Sloth by a rich dude holed up in his mansion, and Lust by a BDSM enthusiast.
• Grand Theft Auto: Both San Andreas and GTA V are at least partly set in a pastiche of Los Angeles called Los Santos, which is rife with parody of the city's culture. Whereas Liberty City from prior games was presented as dour and gray, Los Santos is bright and sunny, though its criminal underworld is no less violent and seedy. San Andreas is set in 1992 at the height of the Gangsta Rap era and climaxed with a recreation of the Rodney King riots, while GTA V was set in 2013 and depicted the city in the wake of the Great Recession.
• L.A. Noire depicts 1940s-era Los Angeles as a place where crime both big and small is rampant everywhere. Arguably the most prominent of these is Mickey Cohen's criminal organization. As Cole Phelps continues taking down various cases, it soon becomes clear that there's also another, much larger Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy present within the city. Said conspiracy has various corrupt LAPD officers on its payroll, which is partly what leads to Phelps' eventual downfall and demise.
• Mutant Football League: The Los Scandelous Damned play up the stereotype. Shake-N-Bake Arena in Los Scandalous, Crazedzonia has glowing demonic runes popping up everywhere, a giant "HOLLYWEED" sign in the upper rafters, the field itself is full of cracks and crevices from the earthquakes, and the weather is often described as hot and smoggy. Brickhead comments that the hotel he was booked in was actually quite pleasant, because, despite the police tape blocking off the homicide investigation taking place inside his own bathroom, they provided free jelly with breakfast.
• Twisted Metal: The second and third games' Los Angeles maps portray it as a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The intro to the second game reveals that the events of the first game destroyed LA and caused Calypso to take his Deadly Game elsewhere, while in the third game, the city was destroyed by a massive earthquake. The first game's maps were set entirely in LA, and Head-On also had a Los Angeles map, but they otherwise presented it as a normal city and suburbs.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines takes place in the Anarch Free State of Los Angeles, which is formerly a warzone between the Anarchs and the Kuei-Jinn, and teetering on the verge of a new four-way war thanks to the Camarilla and the Sabbat rolling into town. The player is also subject to all the human lowlifes making things worse for the hapless civilians when the vampires are too busy killing each other to notice.

Web Animation

• Helluva Boss takes Stolas and I.M.P. to LA in the episode "Seeing Stars" in order to find Octavia, who made off with Stolas's Grimoire and headed there to "see the stars". The show's LA makes Hell itself look positively inviting. Blitzo even lampshades how it looks no different from Hell.
• hololive: Discussed in regards to "Connect The World", Hololive English's first-ever concert (i.e. the first time all the performers will be members of the English branches only, as opposed to previous events where members of EN would be alongside the Japanese and Indonesian members). The concert was held in July 2023 at the YouTube Theatre in Los Angeles, and a number of EN members who've been to LA have noted it's not exactly their favourite city. Nanashi Mumei, for example, responded to a viewer mentioning that they'd be travelling to the USA for the very first time for the concert by suggesting that said viewer also visit other places. She noted that she didn't want the viewer to think that LA is indicative of the US as a whole. Viewers who live in the US also give advice and suggestions in chat to those going to LA for the first time, such as how to stay safe and places to avoid if possible.

Web Original

• Cracked: Robert Brockway's article "5 Terrifying Things Movies Don't Tell You About Los Angeles", in which he rants about the advertising for plastic surgery procedures, vain people who live a "celebrity lifestyle" beyond their means in the hopes of impressing others, the fact that every job requires you include a headshot with your resumé and cover letter, and the overpriced beer.

Web Video

• The YouTube series HelLA, of course. Subject matter includes a woman being made to feel inadequate in a boutique when a supermodel tries on the same dress that she picked, awful experiences with traffic and parking, the party culture, racial stereotyping of the city's Latino community, and a homeless person who turns down donated food because he's gluten-free and vegan.

Western Animation

• Futurama: In "The Cryonic Woman", Fry and his old girlfriend Michelle freeze themselves again and wake up in what looks like a burning post-apocalyptic hellscape, but it turns out their cryo-tube just got dumped in LA.

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