‘Better Things’: The Best New Show About Parenthood
FX has already premiered one of the most exciting new sitcoms — Donald Glover’s Atlanta — and on Thursday night, the network follows it up with another one: Better Things, the FX show co-created by Louis C.K. and star Pamela Adlon. You might recall Adlon as Louie’s on-again, off-again girlfriend in Louie, but in Better Things, Adlon gets to really extend her range, playing a single mom with three kids, struggling to make it in Los Angeles show biz, which here looks like one of the slimier businesses in the universe.
Adlon is Sam Fox, a working actress who does commercials, cartoon voice-overs, and small roles, cobbling together a career to support herself and three daughters. Sam is, of necessity, a tough customer, someone who has to lay down the law and set boundaries for her children and, in her professional life, constantly make small but hard decisions about what jobs she will or won’t accept, weighing a paycheck over self-esteem.
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Better Things could have been a far more conventional sitcom, about a yelling harridan who wraps up every half-hour with an aw-shucks-I-love-you-guys tender moment. Instead, Adlon has built each episode (I’ve watched five of them) around complex problems that don’t lend themselves to easy solutions, and opts to reveal Sam’s vulnerability, frustration, and pain at unexpected moments. When I say that Better Things is the best new show about parenthood, I should also add that it’s not only about parenting, and that it’s also not one of those edgy sitcoms that sacrifices laughs for artiness. Better Things is really, really funny, whether its plot turns on Sam being called upon to give a speech at her daughters’ school about female empowerment, or her eldest daughter, Max (Mikey Madison), feeling the awful pressure of choosing a college, or Sam being considered for the lead in a new TV show (“She’s like, 60 now,” says an openly disgusted female producer looking at Adlon’s so-not-60 headshot).
Adlon does a great job of balancing the exasperation and love a mother feels toward her kids, who also include Hannah Alligood as Frankie and Olivia Edward as Duke. The children, with the exception of sweetie-pie Duke, are appallingly entitled brats, and the show suggests that the crazy, privileged, culturally liberal atmosphere of suburban Los Angeles abets such rude behavior. Its satire of L.A., which has an early-period-Woody Allen aspect, is also a source of its poignance, which is utterly unlike any-period Woody Allen.
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Adlon’s performance is so good, you get — and want — her in nearly every scene, just to see how she’s going to react: to this kid’s temper tantrum, to that rude producer’s snarky comment. It’s a star vehicle that feels like it’s introducing you to an entire family — and an entire universe you want to inhabit.
Better Things airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on FX.
