In my last post, I hinted that I’d be writing next about Pachinko (a must) or Killing Eve (not sure yet). Instead, I’ve been drawn into the fifth season of the Hulu/FX series Better Things. Please watch this show, and rest assured, you needn’t start from the beginning. Just dive into the current season- and tell me what you think.
One word, albeit inadequate, captures it: moving.
But let me add more words. This is a brilliant, bright and dark season (and show) that I don’t think has ever earned its proper due. Pamela Adlon, the show runner/writer/director/star, plays working actor Sam Fox, divorced mother of three daughters, Max, the 20 something eldest, Frankie around 19, and Duke, now 13. Her mother, Phil, is played with brilliance by the English stage and screen notable Celia Imrie, just one of the on-the-nose-not-on-the-nose casting choices that makes Adlon’s vision so original and audacious. And yes, there’s a pattern to the gender-neutral characters’ names-- to signal one of the show’s threads about gender identity.
At its heart, Better Things is about parenting. In episode seven, Sam deputizes Max to stay home with her younger sister Duke and (Duke’s) best friend Pepper, so that she can direct an episode of a Black sitcom, whose show runner Elijah, deftly played by Lena Waithe, generously gives Sam license to allow angst about her whiteness yield to confidence about her own record of artistry. After an exhausting day of dealing with Duke’s self-loathing and excess vaping, Max—whose own story arc itself could be a standalone-- delivers an observation to her mother Sam, one that should become the show’s own watchword: “This mom-shit is not for pussies.”
A lot of the Better Things’ pathos and insight is packed into that line. But not all of it is expressed with the empathy Max displays in that moment. The show can be disturbing. The kids can default to plain mean-spirited. They whine without limits. And they berate their mother over her every twitch.
It’s also a show about managing up, about how we adult parents smack in the middle of the “sandwich generation” handle our own aging parents. The narcissistic Phil knows how to undermine Sam, to exploit her childhood traumas by building sometimes sick-making alliances against her daughter with her grandchildren. Even so, Sam holds out for the increasingly rare glimmers of unmitigated maternal love.
But if I left it there, it still might be difficult to understand why I am not writing about Pachinko. You might ask why I find Better Things so compelling. For me, in the intimacy of this family we see what in Hebrew is known as l’dor v’dor—from generation to generation. As in the ethos of Joey Soloway’s Transparent, Adlon dwells in the epigenetics of what is passed over time and space, in the neurobiological, behavioral and emotional make-up of each character, and their relationship to themselves and their family members.
Sam’s finance dude brother Marion (another un-gendered cast member name played by Kevin Pollak- currently having a nice run also as Moishe Maisel) pushes his sister to consolidate and monetize her limited assets, which in Marion’s view, Sam manages poorly.
Sitting on her living room couch with him, Sam cuts close to the quick: “Marion, you put the douche in fiduciary.” He doesn’t laugh, he winces. In this family, the siblings use humor to viciously dress one another down. Yet in an instant, weeping over childhood wounds, still raw, they collapse into one another’s arms.
The Jewishness of the show and its characters has become more assertive with each season. The humor has always been there, but now the family’s identity is more explicit as Sam and Marion hire a genealogy expert—Carl W. Crudup a sort of Henry Louis Gates vibe—to assist them as they uncover their family history. (Adlon actually was a guest on Gates’ PBS show, Finding Your Roots). “Turn to the next page,” Crudup tells them, as he reveals that several of Sam and Marion’s Ukrainian ancestors were sent to the camps. A second husband of a great great aunt turned her entire family over to the Nazis.
The show is also about the lives of children. Sam’s can be difficult and biting, but also, to Sam’s credit, gloriously free to explore their sexual, gender, political, literary identities. The family banter around pronoun play is often hilarious: a guide kicks off a tour of a Hollywood cemetery stating that his pronouns are he and him. “Mine are fat and transfat,” Sam whispers to Frankie. Drop that mic, Mama Sam.
Yes. There’s still more that I love about this show. Adlon’s autobiographical character Sam, and presumably Adlon too, look to be a great cooks. I relate to the way she takes up every surface in the kitchen and produces glorious cocktails and borscht and Sloppy Joes for her extended family and chosen family. And how at her dinner table she sucks the nasty bits out of huge bowls of unscaled, un-deveined, barely adorned jumbo prawns. (“Jews and their treyf,” one gentile Watchword reader will sigh).
Sam can be foul of mouth, and she flouts norms by smoking on camera, kind of unapologetically. (Though I suppose it’s a sign of my age that alas I can no longer relate to that).
I actually looked up the wrist brace she wears in the kitchen, because I think my own compression gloves are no longer enough for cooking and typing. She plays the piano, beautifully—also with that brace.
And the brace is a portal into a larger thread of the show: living inside a middle aged body. How grateful I am to see Adlon comfortable in her skin, her sexy, un-femmie style and hard-earned way of carrying herself unabashedly on display.
And speaking of skin, there may be a lot about Sam’s life that is a mess, but her makeup? Eyelids and eyebrows, I would kill to have. Ditto, the dewy cheeks and semi-glossy pink lips. (What make up line is her make up artist is using?) I know we’re supposed to gloss over this stuff as unserious, but Sam Fox’s makeup is maybe the one thing in the show where Adlon tells us, implying a break in the fourth wall, “Hey, as bio-pic-y as my show is, this is actually television and my character is entitled to a gorgeously made-up face.”
A footnote about a footnote: Pamela Adlon released the second season of Better Things in 2017. The credits still list the disgraced and recently rehabilitated Louis C.K. as her co-creator. And he was, for season one. Before that, she worked as a writer and then recurring character in his show, Louis. I don’t mean to diminish C.K.’s grotesquely abusive behavior by calling this chapter a footnote. I’m sure it didn’t feel like one to her: the two had collaborated for the better part of a decade.
But in some awful way, his fall generated the ultimate opportunity for Adlon to fully inhabit the role of creator, writer, director, and star, to coalesce her leadership around a level of achievement which, episode after episode in this season, delivers an unsung masterpiece of modern television, and of modern life.
Until the next, when I’ll get to Pachinko, and probably Julia.
Julia
Send me your mailing address and let me know: if you are helping to share Watchword I’ll send you a copy of Min Jin Lee’s novel, Pachinko. I’d definitely read it before you watch the show.
Great writer, and even better, never fails to entertain and entice....I had not even heard of Better Things, but now will leap right in.
Another great read from a great writer! Thank heavens I have an option now that I've finished Bridgerton!