Many TV creators will tell you that they love their characters, and I’m sure they mean it. But nobody shows you who love as much as Pamela Adlon.
Adlon, who created FX’s family comedy “Better Things” (with Louis CK, since departed), also writes, stars, and directs every episode since Season 2. Her directing style is naturalistic and intimate (she has cited John Cassavetes as an inspiration), which tumult and the impassioned struggle as her character, Sam Fox, raises three children as a single mother.
But Adlon is also a portraitist. Early in Monday’s premiere of the fifth and final season, Sam comes across a photo of her oldest daughter, Max (Mikey Madison), now grown and out of the house. The scene cuts to Max, in her apartment, shot in almost exactly the same position, as if sitting in front of a painting. A later sequence featuring Sam’s mother, Phil (Celia Imrie), breaks the story flow to show a series of striking black and white photos of her.
These little jumps in the iconic happening throughout the season. They are a way of showing us this world and its characters as Sam sees them: with full awareness of their flaws, but also with a sense of awe. Making a rocky transition to independence, Max is a constant source of agitation; but it is also, for her mother, a work of artistic creation. Phil infuriates Sam and wears him out; but she is also, as Adlon describes her, a survivor and an indomitable beauty.
Few shows on TV have passed so many complicated feelings through a camera lens as “Better Things.” And the awesome final season has you running at full throttle.
For Sam, seeing things is increasingly her profession. She’s a former child star turned middle-aged working actress, successful enough to be recognized on the street, but not so successful that she doesn’t have to worry about the bills. Now she is attracted to directing. After a chance meeting, Ron Cephas Jones (playing himself) offers her a gig for the taping of an episode of his new sitcom, which he describes as “families, new beginnings and painful children”.
These are topics that Sam knows a little about. And while the final shoot is messy, directing suits her well. She is someone who brings people together, sees them on their own terms and takes them out of themselves. She has also put together a surrogate family such as her boyfriend Rich (Diedrich Bader), who has a quasi-parental bond with the children, especially with Max.
For Sam, seeing is a duty of love. At one point, she leads a wedding and asks the groom to promise to “take loving pictures” of his bride “while she’s not looking.” To give someone, in ‘Better Things’, is to see them honestly – even ruthlessly – but also to elevate them. You help them find their light.
The shift in Sam’s career is one of several arcs that give the last season more plot structure than the last. Max is going through a personal crisis that she is afraid to share with Sam. Frankie (Hannah Riley), the middle child, struggles with gender identity (while Sam adjusts to the idea of having three children instead of three daughters). The youngest, Duke (Olivia Edward), is struck by the moody sledgehammer of adolescence. And Sam and her brother, Marion (Kevin Pollak), wonder how long Phil can live alone.
But from scene to scene, “Better Things” remains a collection of moments and observations – “Ephemera”, to quote the title of the fourth episode of the season, arguably the best the series has ever done.
What happens in it? Few. Marion helps a wisecracking, unruly Sam with some financial planning. (As he guides her to tick a box for “unmarried”, she asks, “Was ‘single’ unavailable?”) Frankie talks pronouns to Sam, who diverts the subject with jokes. And Sam, in turn, has a hard time getting Max involved in her future plans when they visit the grave of Sam’s estranged father. Meanwhile, Duke visits an antique store and the sight of all the unclaimed tchotchkes left by the dead makes her sad: “I don’t feel connected to anything!”
But of course she is; Everybody is; everything is invisibly connected here. Sam’s evasion and recalcitrance in one scene become the attitude that frustrates her in Max in another. With each excellent segment, the episode deals with the cycle of time; about remembering the past and planning or avoiding the future; about, in Sam’s words, ‘being part of a greater chain of history’.
In other words, it’s about the cosmic, a theme that wryly informs the entire season. The premiere opens with a sequence to ‘Galaxy Song’, Monty Python’s cheerful existentialist ode to the absurd wonder of life. It ends with another musical piece, which I won’t reveal, and a reflection on our place in an immense universe. In between there is a lot of confrontation with family secrets and legacies, both literally and psychologically. (Perhaps because of all the focus on inheritance and eternity, the final season also brings out the Jewish culture of the Fox family more than ever.)
It’s a lot of work, all that inventory, and it brings all kinds of things to the surface. Time and again, there are scenes where one character gets the least poke and pours out a whole flood, like when Marion argues with Sam about her finances and suddenly sobbs about how the charismatic Sam monopolized the family’s attention when they were kids.
(By the way, Pollak is amazing this season amidst a nothing short of amazing cast. It’s instructive to compare his work here to his roar in the exaggerated mode of the current season of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”; Adlon’s series has made him similar tones of tsori, but in a much more grounded and poignant way.)
Don’t be surprised if ‘Better Things’ also brings out a lot in you. I looked at my screeners a few months after my mother died; my siblings and I had been going through papers and pictures and knick knacks – ephemera – discovered history and jokes. I’m sure the season has hit me harder because of that. But Adlon’s work is so full of emotion and disarmingly funny that it never feels like a bummer. It feels like a gift.
I’ve praised “Better Things” a lot since it premiered in 2016. But I sometimes worry that I’ve made it sound too small by describing the life story story. As this remarkable final season shows, it’s anything but. Maybe everything here is dust in the wind. But there is another term for an endless collection of fragments and details: we know it as the universe. On ‘Better Things’ it feels like coming home through the eyes of Pamela Adlon.
