Rick Bentley Tribune News Service The longtime thinking when it comes to penning anything is to write what you know. That’s exactly what Pamela Adlon has done with her FX series “Better Things.” After a 16-month hiatus, the series returns Thursday with Adlon not only directing all 12 episodes but also serving as the executive producer. She loves those jobs, but the most important thing to her about the series revolving around single mom Sam Fox (Adlon) – who has no filter and is doing her best to raise three daughters: Max (Mikey Madison), Frankie (Hannah Alligood) and Duke (Olivia Edward) – is she gets to write the tales based on story ideas that come from her own life as a mom and daughter. “This show is therapy. The awful thing (that) happened at Thanksgiving dinner. Somebody pissed you off in the store. Or some other thing. You’re driving home from that situation. You’re like, ‘God, I wish I had said this. What if I had said that? What if this happened? Wouldn’t that be awful if that happened?’ So all those thoughts are kind of the way my show works the best,” Adlon says. “I have this saying: ‘Bad for my life, good for my show.’ “So if it didn’t happen in my life, then I go down the road in my head and I think, wouldn’t that be fun? Wouldn’t that be bad? Let’s do that.” Taking those ideas and turning them into scripts for a cable comedy takes time. Adlon started working on the scripts for the upcoming season on Feb. 5, 2018, five days before she wrapped up the editing on Season 2. She wasn’t at a loss for ideas, but the timeframe to get the scripts ready was complicated by a mix of work and taking care of her own family. Her work on “Better Things” has been so successful, the question of taking her writing, directing and acting to the film world keeps being suggested. Adlon doesn’t want to think about future plans until Season 3 is done. “I did not want to pursue or be too greedy. Now I feel like it was very important to me to create this season and get through this season and give it my full attention. Now I’m excited about creating new content and moving forward and working on other projects,” Adlon says. Before becoming the multiple hat-wearing force behind “Better Things,” Adlon was a writer on the comedy series “Louie.” But, she’s better known for her work in front of the camera, with credits going back to when the 52-year-old New York native was 16 and appeared in the movie musical “Grease 2.” Among her long list of acting roles since are “The Facts of Life,” “The Redd Foxx Show,” “Bobby’s World,” “Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot” and “King of the Hill.” All the work has gone into helping Adlon be the best director she can be. “I’m an actor first. So it’s anathema to me to tell another actor how to do something. And being an actor and being saved many times with scene partners and seeing what they can bring, I know not to say anything,” Adlon says. “If you wrote something yourself and you have it in stone in your head, you have the voice in your head, that’s a nightmare. I’ve done so many animated shows where the writer/director is doing you are into the 30 takes, 40 takes. “So it’s something where just let people come and then see what they have. And ‘Oh, that’s interesting. I really think that might be a way to go with this scene.’ And then, if there’s something in particular that I really would like to convey, then I’ll say to an actor, ‘I’ve got something for you.’ I’ll pull them aside. I won’t yell it across the room the way it has been done to me so many times as an actor.” Adlon’s work on Season 3 meant directing a long list of guest stars including Sharon Stone, Matthew Broderick, Doug Jones, Glynn Turman, Judy Reyes, Cree Summer, Charlie Robinson, Janina Gavankar and Marsha Thomason. Recurring players Diedrich Bader, Greg Cromer, Rebecca Metz, Kevin Pollak and Alysia Reiner also return this season. ‘Better Things’ 10 p.m. Thursday FX<doc-sep>“Better Things” returns Thursday for its third season, emerging from the shadow of the Louis C.K. scandal. BETTER THINGS "Chicago" Episode 1 (Airs Thursday, February 28 10:00 pm/ep) -- Pictured: (l-r) Mikey Madison as Max, Pamela Adlon as Sam Fox. CR: Suzanne Tenner/FX BETTER THINGS -- Pictured: Pamela Adlon as Sam Fox. CR: Pamela Littky/FX Of the many, many things Louis C.K. has been accused of lately, “having good judgment” rarely makes the cut. That seems fair considering the way his career went down in flames because of his sexual misconduct — and the way he spit gasoline on those embers during a comeback attempt by mocking the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Still, the disgraced comedian knows talent when he sees it, as evidenced by his longtime collaboration with Pamela Adlon, even though the ensuing scandal almost spelled the end for the comedy they created together. “Better Things” (10 p.m. Thursday, FX) returns for its third season, 15 months after that implosion, with Adlon finally, fully, front and center. The only sign that C.K., who wrote or co-wrote all but one episode during the show’s first two years, was ever involved comes after each episode with a union-required co-creator credit. There’s no drop-off in quality in this batch of new episodes. If anything, they’re stronger than ever. The semiautobiographical comedy follows actress Sam Fox (Adlon) and her struggle raising three daughters while looking after her aging mother (Celia Imrie), who lives across the street. In the season’s opening seconds, Sam is in her underwear going through her closet, searching for clothes she can squeeze into before flinging them to the floor. “I just bought these,” she marvels at a pair of jeans that not even the most careless plumber would find appropriate. “Really? How did this happen?” It’s a moment that’s honest, raw and delivered with a mixture of shock and bemusement that sets the stage for the episodes that follow. She’s proud to help prepare her oldest, Max (Mikey Madison), for her first day of college in Chicago. But while it’s clear she’ll miss having her at home in Los Angeles, Sam can’t fly back without a shopping trip that includes the most embarrassing cart in the history of mothers exacting revenge. “Condoms, condoms. Pads, pads. Panty liners, panty liners,” she announces, while raking items off the shelves. “Condoms, condoms. … Condoms, condoms. … Pregnancy test. Plan B, Plan B, Plan B.” In other episodes, when Sam isn’t making her gynecologist uncomfortable, she’s suffering the indignities of standing in line for a portable toilet under the blazing sun while making a monster movie. “Better Things” may have its fantastical elements — this year, Sam has recurring visions of her dead father (Adam Kulbersh), dressed in all his ’70s finest — but Adlon, who writes or co-writes most of this season’s episodes and directs all 12, keeps most everything else refreshingly real. The 52-year-old, who’s been a working actress since she was 9, explodes the myth that moviemaking is all “Entourage”-style hot tubs and yacht parties. It’s 92 degrees in Sam’s trailer on a dusty hellscape of a set, she and two co-stars are banged up when they’re put through a stunt without a safety briefing, and the director (Kris Marshall, “Love Actually’s” America-loving Colin Frissell) hovers between indifferent and dangerously inept. So, yeah, there’s a powerful scene in which Sam stands up to the man in charge of a toxic work environment even though no one else has her back — because, careers. It’s as close as Adlon or the show comes to addressing the Time’s Up movement that derailed the career of the man who’d been her writing partner since 2006 and the short-lived HBO comedy “Lucky Louie.” Things were so bad during the C.K. fallout, Adlon didn’t know whether she could continue with the show. “It’s really hard to function when you’re in shock and in grief. I’d lost my passion,” she told Variety. Thankfully, she rediscovered it, learned to work with new writers and realized she had better things — and “Better Things” — ahead. Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567. Follow @life_onthecouch on Twitter.<doc-sep>A few things are different about Better Things. In its third season, Pamela Adlon’s autobiographical dramedy about middle-aged single motherhood is distinctly more serialized than it’s been in the past; to the dreamy, sketch-like vignettes and bouts of magical realism that defined its earlier seasons, the show adds some substantive plots that bring it closer to a conventionally structured TV series. Adlon’s heroine, Sam Fox, takes an acting job on a big-budget blockbuster shot in the California desert. Her oldest daughter, Max (Mikey Madison), leaves the nest and starts the uneasy path to adulthood. Her mother, Phyl (Celia Imrie), finally reckons with the impact of her aging, both on herself and others. Such tweaks have one obvious source: the addition of outside talent to what had previously been a two-person effort. Better Things had initially foregone a writers’ room, that staple of television’s collective-minded creative process, entirely; now, its roster includes Sarah Gubbins, co-creator of I Love Dick, as well as alumni of Bones and The Last Ship. Adlon still stars in and directs every single episode, an effort so exhausting she schedules daily isolation time on set. “I don’t fall asleep,” her onscreen alter ego observes at one point. “I pass out.” Like the Fox family unit, Better Things may be maturing, but the bulk of the effort falls squarely on its matriarch. Here is where a reviewer must acknowledge what Adlon herself would like to move past. Understandable as it would have been for Adlon to delegate writing duties for efficiency’s sake, Better Things’ staffing changes were prompted by something both more urgent and less savory. Adlon co-created the show with Louis C.K., the comedian and longtime collaborator with whom she co-starred on both Lucky Louie, C.K.’s ill-fated HBO sitcom, and Louie, his staggeringly influential FX series. Louie’s effect on other shows was mostly a matter of precedent, creating a model of auteur-driven, extremely meta, relatively low-budget vehicles for other creators to follow. On Better Things, its presence—and C.K.’s—was much more immediate. Throughout the first two seasons, C.K. had sole or shared script credit on every single episode. Sign up for the The Ringer Newsletter Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. Email (required) By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice and European users agree to the data transfer policy. Subscribe The 2017 revelation that C.K. had previously exposed himself to female performers and colleagues without their consent, a long-circulating rumor reported out by The New York Times and subsequently confirmed by C.K. himself, arrived in the middle of Better Things’ second season. The story posed questions both urgent and existential for the future of the show. FX swiftly terminated its overall deal with the performer, but what of the show he currently had on the air? Adlon, for her part, understandably asked for privacy and room to process a development that was as much personal as professional. For his part, network president John Landgraf emphasized Adlon’s ultimate ownership of her and C.K.’s joint creation: “It’s Pamela’s show, these are her stories, this is her life,” he told the Television Critic’s Association in January 2018. “She’s the creative engine of that show.” The impulse to stress a woman’s agency over her higher-profile male colleague is a good one, as is the refusal to punish Adlon for C.K.’s indiscretions. Better Things is Adlon’s brainchild before anything else; despite their stylistic similarities, there were important and telling distinctions between it and Louie even before C.K.’s actions retroactively made him a toxic asset. Where C.K.’s story of life post-divorce was a self-flagellating portrait of unmoored masculinity, Adlon’s is something much more optimistic. What comes after the nuclear family is, in her view, something unorthodox and taxing and routinely underappreciated, not least by her own kids, but also beautiful in its chaos. Yet it was also valid to wonder what a post-C.K. Better Things would look like. In interviews leading up to the season, Adlon has finally elaborated on her feelings toward C.K. beyond her brief initial statement. “It felt like the world was ending,” she told The New Yorker, before stipulating: “I just need to focus. I don’t want to have to weigh in on his [stand-up] sets.” There’s an apparent understanding that the elephant in the room must be acknowledged, but also an insistence that Adlon hasn’t so much as communicated with C.K. for months. She’s ready to move on. The closest Better Things gets to incorporating this ordeal along with the rest of Adlon’s biography is an episode where Sam calls out blatant safety violations on the set of her action film. The incident is an effort to highlight the abuses of power that don’t technically fall under the umbrella of #MeToo, since they don’t involve sexual harassment, but are very much in the spirit of calling attention to inequities in the workplace. It’s also part of Better Things’ larger project of depicting Hollywood as a workplace, if an unconventional one. Show business is populated by many more laborers like Sam than stars like the movie-within-a-show’s fictional director. Their lives are unglamorous, down to the union bylaws and contract provisions that govern them; they’re also worth examining. The scene feels like a microcosm of this new Better Things, continuing series-long concerns in lightly adjusted ways. Adlon’s stylistic hallmarks remain in place: the cold opens, many of which see Sam wrestle with the indignities of aging; the astonishing rudeness and occasional poignance of the Fox kids; the loose, lived-in portrayals of Sam cooking dinner for her makeshift family, a medley of actual blood relations and longtime friends. In a conversation with The New York Times, Adlon described channeling her anguish into Better Things in a way that built on the show’s ethos instead of distracting from it: “I wanted to see these women kind of unraveling. I wanted [the theme of the season to be about] the changes of your life and honoring that. Which is very much kind of a vintage Better Things thing.” Better Things has never been especially interested in plot, yet another reason behind-the-scenes drama threatened to overwhelm the understated, unpretentious show itself.<doc-sep>The Season 3 premiere of “Better Things” is about nothing, and it’s about everything. Sam Fox (Pamela Adlon), a mid-list actress who lives in Los Angeles, tries to squeeze into some old clothes she’s outgrown. She takes her oldest daughter, Max (Mikey Madison), off to start college in Chicago. She has a scary flight back. She arrives home at night, discovers that her mother, Phyllis (Celia Imrie), has had a fender-bender, and ends up, exhausted, helping her stressed-out daughter Frankie (Hannah Alligood), with her homework. There is nothing like a traditional plot arc in the episode, nor is there in most episodes of “Better Things.” And yet, as the confident new season unfolds starting Thursday on FX, you see the number of themes the premiere has casually established: aging, growing up, freedom, dependence, mortality, responsibility, the flowering and wilting of life, all at the same time. That’s all — just human existence, the labor of love. And there is nothing on TV today that represents it better or more gorgeously. Sam’s college trip with Max, for instance, nails the tension of parenting between the desire to hover over your kids and to push them away. Sam takes Max to a bar and urges her to seize her new life, but when Max leaves her to go out with some friends, Sam calls her back: “Wait! I want my big, life, ‘This Is Us’ milestone-moment goodbye hug!”<doc-sep>
Since it first began in 2016, Better Things has been slowly becoming one of the finest comedies on television, but it has always been resolutely un-flashy in its brilliance. Partly that’s because its subject matter is contained and domestic, and because, in a typical episode, not very much appears to happen at all. Pamela Adlon, who writes, directs and stars, has fashioned a gorgeous and loosely autobiographical story about a raspy-voiced single mother, Sam, who is a jobbing actor, and her three daughters, living in Los Angeles. It touches on elements that are at once familiar - ageing, mortality, how women and men relate to one another - and gives them all new powers. The show was created by Adlon and her one-time close friend and collaborator, Louis CK, with whom she shared writing duties. But, as the second season ended, and allegations about CK’s behaviour began to surface, it seemed for a moment as if Better Things could become collateral damage, caught up in the fallout of its association with him. In the aftermath, Adlon severed ties with CK and with the manager they shared, Dave Becky. In an interview with the New Yorker, Adlon said she didn’t know if she could continue with the show, whether her heart was still in it or not. Happily for fans of this beautiful, affecting series, she took some time to work it out, hired new co-writers, and got on with the job. It feels apt, given that the show is so often about Sam having to do just that, whether that is work, or raising her daughters, or looking after her increasingly forgetful mother. She may find any given situation tough, but there is rarely an option of simply giving up. “There is a mountain of mom shit I have to do every day,” she tells her doctor, when he tries to espouse a “let it go” approach to life’s stresses. For her, letting it go is just not possible, but she finds a remarkable amount of warmth in getting by. The third season of Better Things finds it in better shape than it has ever been. The first two episodes are directed and written solely by Adlon, who shares writing duties as the season progresses. As Sam’s eldest daughter Max moves away to college, Sam wonders why she’s putting on weight. Then, there is a brief, terrifying brush with mortality. A lesser show would have made that the focus, or at least drawn it out beyond a few scrappy minutes. But Adlon’s scenes all end where in any traditional series, they might just get going, leaving the impression of snippets of life that ultimately all carry weight of some sort. In one moment there’s a joke about vanity, and getting carded; in another, a near-death experience. Life is busy. Things happen. This has always been a comedy that has dared to try things out. Last season, Sam, feeling underappreciated by her children, staged her own eulogy, so they could talk about how much they loved her. As a concept, that sounds cloying and self-involved, but if Adlon ever dangles her storylines close to those edges, she yanks them right back with a pithy line, or another abrupt end to a scene. Instead, the fake funeral was gentle and moving and hilarious, because Better Things is sentimental without ever being trite, and, by contrast, painful when it should be soothing. Mikey Madison, Pamela Adlon, Olivia Edward, Hannah Alligood and Celia Imrie. Photograph: FX Networks It feels even more unencumbered by propriety or expectations this time, not least in Celia Imrie’s portrayal of Sam’s blunt mother and nextdoor neighbour Phil. Phil’s memory continues to decline and, again, on almost any other show, this drama would be front and centre, but here, it’s around the edges where the stories really happen. Phil neutralises a tense family argument with a well-timed fart: “Oh dear, I’ve made a pong.” When a pair of exes explain their new house-sharing arrangement, she chimes in: “Sounds awfully complicated. In my day we just stayed married and had affairs.” As the more viral corners of the internet know, children swearing unexpectedly can be hilarious. When Duke and Frankie’s bickering becomes unbearable, Sam tells them to let it all out: one minute of open, unmonitored hatred before civility is re-established. Frankie yells grievances about the perfection of her younger sibling, but Duke unleashes a torrent of creative filth that would make Selina Meyer blush.