THB #207: Better Things - In Memoriam

(Note: I started writing this piece on April 26. It was meant to be THB #132. Other stuff came up. And they pushed Pamela Adlon hard on the media trail… so I decided to save it to support the Emmy win… before there were no nominations. And now, on a Wednesday in mid-August, with nothing really worth writing, I will finish it and put my love for this series out into the ether.)

The first episode of Better Things (9/8/2016) opens with Sam Fox (Pamela Adlon) sitting in a busy mall… a short, female W.C. Fields, barely paying attention to her young child, Duke (Olivia Edward), who is standing next to Sam at a the bench, crying. An outsider shows disdain and Sam snaps back to the unspoken criticism, “Do you want to buy her the earrings? That’s why she is crying - because of the six dollar earrings that she has at home already. But she wants them for right now, so you should go into that store and buy them for her. ‘Cause I’m not doing it. Or stop looking.”

For 5 years/52 episodes, we experienced Sam’s boundaries. For herself, for her daughters, for her immediate family, her work colleagues, and her friends.

She often talks like W.C. Fields, but that is not who she is. She walks in truth… sometimes wrapped in a necessary lie. In some ways, she is Jim Carrey in Liar Liar, trying diplomacy for as long as she can, but always ultimately driven to truth… a truth based in real love, so as brutal as it often is, it doesn’t destroy.

A single mother to 3 daughters.
An ex-wife to a “man of leisure.”
A daughter to a mother who is every bit as honest, but not in any way as loving.
A daughter to a dead father whose flaws and similarities haunt her.

She is a working actress of some accomplishment who is grateful for the gig, but not forgetful about her worth.

She is a person who loves things. Cooking. Driving. Sex, when it’s actually good.

She is the adult in the room, even while she is trying to be childish.

But most of all, a friend. She friends hard. She is unable or unwilling to compromise truth for comfort. She carries it all. But she doesn’t hang much of anything over the heads of others.

We spend a lot of time in the bathroom and the bed (mostly sex-free) with Sam Fox. We see her at her best and at her worst. Sitting on the toilet and sometimes plunging… an activity that appears often enough in the series to be considered a theme. Tampons and menstrual blood - her own or her daughter’s being eaten by the dog (again) - is as easily offered in conversation as getting a glass of water.

The series itself is a testament to Pamela Adlon’s growth too.

Season One of the series is really about Sam. Adlon and/or Louis C.K. wrote every episode. Adlon directed only Episode 2 and Episode 10. C.K., Nisha Ganatra, and Lance Bangs did a wonderful job behind the camera in that season, setting visual structure with Adlon for the show. But that season closing episode was helmed by Adlon and no one would take that spot from her again for the next 42 episodes.

Season Two still bears the weight of Louis C.K., who got #MeTooed as the season aired its last shows in November 2017. Some of the great episodes are found in that season, including “September,” “Rising,” “Blackout,” “Arnold Hall,” “White Rock,” “Graduation,” and maybe the best episode ever, “Eulogy.” The other 3 episodes are also terrific… but the other 7 episodes each have a moment or moments like we have never really seen elsewhere in a TV situation comedy.

The Season 2 opener, “September,” starts with Sam, alone, in thought… on the toilet. When she finally leaves the bathroom, she emerges into a house full of people. She’s giving a party. To some degree, Sam will be endlessly trying to give a party for the next 4 seasons.

The episode is loaded with fast, deep character development, but the A-story is Sam dealing with her eldest teen daughter having a fling with a man more than twice her age. It was the beginning of the change to what Better Things would be until its final, Fellini-esque episodes.

Instead of being “The Adventures of Sam Fox,” the show, with Adlon more at the wheel, was becoming a series of short stories of the highest order. There were all kinds of things going on around the core of every episode. But every episode had The Event, an unexpected turn that made that one episode indelible.

In “Rising,” it was the throw down with the guy Sam had been sleeping with for 3 weeks in the parking lot of Musso & Frank.

In “Robin”/”Sick,” it’s Sam falling for the “evolved man,” but realizing that neither she nor the guy is who they need to be in order to get where they each want to be heading.

In “Phil,” it is the vulnerability of the invincible mother (Sam’s).

I think I fell hopelessly in love with Better Things with “Eulogy” in Season 2. Sam is not feeling seen by her children and they stage her funeral in a surprising, beautiful way. Adlon shared story credit with C.K., but he got the credit for the teleplay. Still, a remarkable event of heart and clean insight.

There is an episode about considering sex with a close friend’s ex. There is the episode in which the ex-husband’s father asking Sam to continue to support the ex beyond their divorce agreement.

Season 2 ends with “Graduation,” the centerpiece of which is Max, the eldest daughter, graduating high school, and her father, Xander, not showing. The episode ends with Max’s graduation present from her mom… her sisters, her grandmother, and her mom doing a choreographed dance together. An act of communal love.

But somehow, in Season 3, the real magic of the series starts.

Adlon had no way of knowing that she was graduating when they finished shooting that last episode of Season 2. But just before it aired, Louis C.K., who had been part of every episode, was #MeTooed in the New York Times and everywhere else.

The show went off its September premiere axis, premiering Season 3 at the end of February of 2019. Adlon assembled a writing staff. She continued to direct and star in every episode.

In “Chicago,” the first episode of Season 3, the storytelling softens. Sam is dropping Max at college in Chicago. She heads home on a plane that has to land because of a small fire. When she finally gets home, he mother’s car has had an accident, strangers are in her living room c/o her middle daughter, Frankie, and… life just rolls along.

“Nesting” is a love affair with an older generation of actors who probably hung around their house when she was growing up. Bernie Kopell, Glynn Turman, Nicolas Coster and Mary Jo Catlett throwing down wisdom and laughs. Plus Sharon Stone and a monkey.

Season 3 was the one season where celebrity guest stars were really in play, since the pilot with David Duchovny. Sam also had a thing with her therapist, played by Matthew Broderick.

The epic “ Monsters in the Moonlight” in which Sam has sexual fantasies about her ex-husband… and flirts with a late lesbian fling.

“No Limits” is the first incarnation of the girls dinner, which would become a staple of the series in Seasons 3-5.

Cree Summer and Judy Reyes would join Alysia Reiner and Rebecca Metz and eventually Judy Gold as the group of women in “Father’s Day,” (Season 4, Episode 8) one of the great episodes of the series in which the women examine themselves and how they relate to the men who have (mostly) let them down in their lives.

“Father’s Day” is especially remarkable in bringing together so many of the pieces of the season. Men get a say. Women a generation or two older than Sam and her friends get their say. Even Sam’s daughters and their friends get their say on divorce and how it affects them.

Season 4, Episode 4, “DNA,” manages to capture the way the show stays within its universe but turns corners in a way that is usually seen in literature, not television. It’s such a dense series of seemingly disconnected events that I can’t do it justice. “It goes from “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” to a mother-daughter wrestling match (Sam and her mom, not one of the kids) to a stray owl in Sam’s bed to having to search through the family dog’s poop after he eats the fingertip of the youngest daughter’s friend to Sam calling her eldest daughter a “cunt," really doesn’t explain in nearly well enough. (For the record, Ira Parket wrote the remarkable episode, which I will forever think of as “ The Cunt Episode,” as it is a singular moment in TV history.)

It’s not A-story, B-story… it’s a full half-dozen stories, ebbing and flowing through its 24 minutes. And they all feel natural and real, with at least 4 characters showing multiple sides of themselves.

This is the magic of Better Things. It doesn’t think it is a sitcom. It doesn’t think it’s a drama. It doesn’t think it’s TV. It’s a modern-day version of the 4-part “Little Women” books by Louisa May Alcott, told across 52 episodes, broken into brief glimpses of the lives of this family of 5 women and everyone around them.

You can watch any episode and have an experience somewhat different than any other.

Season 5, which closed out the series, is the one most tied to the 4 years of show history that came before it. A lot more shorthand. A lot of untied bows to tie up.

At the end of the first episode of that last season, F*ck Anatoly’s Mother, the most central of the many works of art that fill the Fox household - a young man in a beanie at the top of the stairs who the Foxs touch gently when they pass - falls and smashes into pieces.

The moment is shocking. But it fits where the season goes. It’s just another year… but it’s not. One daughter on her own. The next one heading out of the house. Menapause screaming at Sam. Even hip grandmother Phyllis is leaving the nest. So many new stories… but this one is coming to its end.

There are a bunch of heavy, heavy landmarks in the closing season. Adlon and the other writers find humanity in all of it. Everyone gets their moment. Everyone gets heard. Nothing is solved.

Perhaps my favorite moment in the finale, perhaps the season is when Sam’s sister-in-law, Caroline (played by Rosalind Chao), who has been an iceberg and perhaps the clearest antagonist of the series, brings Sam a replacement for The Boy statue. The complexity of the feelings between these women is yet another beautiful reflection of light through the prism of The Artist Known As Pamela Segall Adlon.

I’m sure, at this point, Adlon would shove the credit to the cast and crew and writers and everyone who brought the show together. And she’d be right. The casting, from the daughters to the close circle of friends, to people doing single episodes, is never less than perfect. And the show’s production always serves the core ideas, never itself.

But back to the finale’…

There is a lot in this episode. Potential new love. A reuniting of an old love that the show kicked around for 5 years. Frankie in all her complexity. A goodbye to a major possession of the past. Tributes to Sam that feel profoundly sincere. And even, as only Pamela Adlon would, the start of a new period when it seemed menopause had ruled that out.

Pamela Adlon says goodbye, with a smile on her face… satisfied with this work… ready to explore elsewhere.

I think I have been dragging my feet on this piece for a while because I do love this show so much. Like the greatest tv ever, I can turn to this show, almost any episode, to reground myself when I am feeling lost and in despair. I don’t want to say goodbye (though it is all there on Hulu when I need it).

I am a couple years old than Adlon. I have 3 sisters. But just the 1 kid. We are not alike. I don’t think I identify with Sam Fox. But I can feel the love, the loss, and the hope. I connect with the idea of always playing at your highest intelligence (an improv term that I connect to the late, great John Michalski), which Better Things always does.

So much of life happens in those moments of whiplash between joy and pain, comfort and ennui. Better Things captured that.

Thanks, Sam/Pam.

Until tomorrow…