Pamela Adlon made a career out of her voice, much of it lent to boys, before she put her own life on screen and let it run without a plot. Better Things is loose, plotless and closer to life than almost anything on television.
Fi1m perspective
A small, hoarse, tired woman stands in a kitchen in Los Angeles while three daughters talk over her. The scene moves to a car, then to a bathroom, then stops, and the next scene has nothing to do with it. Nothing has happened and you have been told a great deal. That is a Pamela Adlon episode, and in Better Things she made fifty-two of them.
She was a child actor first, in Grease 2 (1982), and then for a long time she was a voice. Bobby Hill in King of the Hill (1997) is the one most people know: a cheerful, soft boy entirely unbothered by his father's disappointment, which is that programme's warmest running joke. She had live-action parts, in Say Anything... (1989) and Californication (2007), but the turn came with Louie (2010). She wrote on it, produced it and played Pamela, the single mother Louie wants and who tells him at length why not, and she is the second author of the thing. Pamela is funnier than Louie and knows it. Every scene they share is a small argument she wins.
Better Things (2016) is that argument carried on without him. She created it with Louis C.K., and the first season borrows the shape of Louie: short pieces, cut hard, filmed as if nobody had told the actors where the camera was. When she went on alone the series got looser, slower and better, and by the later seasons she was directing most of it herself. The method owes something to Cassavetes, and you see it in how long she lets a shot run. It moved us more than a twenty-three-minute comedy has any right to, and it did so by staying put: the joke goes, the girls go upstairs, and what is left is Sam Fox, who loves her children so much she can hardly stand them. Celia Imrie's Phil, the mother across the road, is the finest thing in it, English, vain, forgetful and funnier than anyone else on screen.
The faults come from the same place as the virtues. Some episodes stop rather than end. The scenes of Sam at work are thinner than the ones at home. Anyone waiting for something to happen will wait a long time. Her motto for the series, she has said, is that 'life is what happens to you when you’re too busy to make any other plans', which is a fair description of it and, some weeks, a fair complaint.
She has since directed a film, Babes (2024), a comedy about pregnancy, and we are curious whether the method survives a feature's length and a story it cannot wander away from. Meanwhile Better Things is best watched at home in the evening, one or two episodes at a time. It does not build to anything, so there is no need to hurry.
Biography
Pamela Adlon, also credited as Pam Adlon, Pamela Segall and Pamela Segall Adlon, is an American actress and voice actress. Born on 9 July 1966 in New York City, she began her career in the early 1980s with roles in films such as Grease 2 (1982) and television series including The Facts of Life. She appeared as Rebecca in the 1989 film Say Anything....
Adlon is known for her voice work, including Bobby Hill on the animated series King of the Hill (1997–2010), for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award, and Ashley Spinelli on Recess (1997–2003). She has voiced characters in numerous other series and films, among them Tinker Bell (2008) as Vidia and episodes of The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon.
In live-action roles she has appeared in Californication (2007–2014) and Louie (2010–2015), on which she also worked as a writer and producer. Since 2016 she has starred as Sam Fox in the series Better Things, which she co-created, wrote, produced and directed.
