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Better Things: 2022

 "Better Things" returns for Season Five in a few weeks; Marc and I are partway through Season Four. If you're a fan, please continue....


This is a show about a "matriarchal dystopia" (according to one of the characters). 

Phil, a British expat, lives near her daughter, Sam, and Sam's own three daughters, in Los Angeles. The clan of five talk and bicker--and the talk is often about sex, or pooping. (Sam resents helping her daughter to arrange a hook-up in a motel; Sam purchases a new maximum-strength toilet; Sam's youngest daughter believes that her period is the result of having been hit by a car.)

Certain stories recur. Sam is unhappy with her Hollywood career, which requires her to "re-audition" for once-guaranteed roles, negotiate a tug-of-war between agents, and defer to an airhead from a younger generation. 

Sam's mother, Phil, resists aging; she bathes nude in a neighbor's pool, uninvited, and she drives a car even when she knows she should not. (It's a family car-crash that finally persuades Phil to throw in the towel.) 

Sam's brilliant middle daughter tests boundaries, trying to arrange a "white-person quinceanera" and actually disappearing from her home for several days. And Sam's youngest daughter begins to dislike her own body; this daughter wishes she could be Kim Kardashian, getting cosmetic surgery for "an ugly vein," choosing ballet over soccer.

Questions linger. For example, the middle daughter might be LGBTQ; no one really knows, as is often the case for long stretches, in actual life. 

And one of my favorite sequences has a kid losing part of her finger in a car-door-slam; this causes one witness to laugh uncontrollably; a piece of the finger gets ingested by the family dog; Sam must then try to dig the finger out of the dog's poop. The sense of chaos builds and builds, until you feel you're watching a horror movie. How can this end? 

Abruptly, the focus shifts; Sam's oldest daughter, a restaurant hostess, is enraged because her black dress isn't laundered. "I need that dress; my other dresses would show that I'm having my period." 

Sam unwisely snaps back: "MY period never caused me these problems in my twenties." 

And the daughter has a smart reply: "I am a restaurant hostess, on my feet. You were a pampered actress." The fight gets louder, and the missing half-finger is forgotten, and that's the point. Living with children sometimes means that a thousand things get tossed at you at once, so that you soon forget that there is a literal puddle of blood waiting for you in your front yard.

I think Pamela Adlon's sense of freedom and messiness is inspiring. I have a theory that her show's title--"Better Things"--is a blunt comment about TV. "You're watching crap. I'm going to give you a few better things."

Four years in -- Adlon is still delivering.
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