There are things we (OK, I) do when everything everywhere seems so incomprehensibly bad. There is the ceremonial staring stoically out the window imagining that “Everybody Hurts” is playing and we are poignantly framed in a moody music video. A filthy calorie orgy of mozzarella sticks, ice cream, and variations on the theme of “wine” is typically involved. Our trusty ol’ friend, The Fetal Position, gets a long visit.
But those are numbing mechanisms, and they don’t do the service that—and I’m serious here—TV does.
I’m not talking about those things we turn to in order to distract ourselves or turn off our minds, be it a Real Housewives binge or a classic comfort watch of Sex and the City for the 17th time. (Fine, 23rd time.) The Great British Baking Show, a cooking competition in which ordinary people bake cakes and I inexplicably cry once an episode, is a bit closer. It’s the feelings that matter.
These last few years, and especially this past week, I’ve found myself drawn to the kinds of shows that don’t ignore the Big Feelings of life, but guide you through them. Not shows that trigger intense emotional reactions—say, a weekly irritation download after each new episode of And Just Like That…—or center something tragic or harrowing. I’m talking about shows that trade in the everyday; that acknowledge that we carry with us a constant montage of the incomprehensibly bad, but also that we still need to get through the day, with all its joys and pains, and all the ways we fail and grow.
I’m talking about a show like Better Things.
Pamela Adlon’s precious jewel of a series launched its final season this week on FX with two new episodes, which you can watch now on Hulu. They are lovely, as this series always has been. They are also needed, and seem to be right on time.
For five seasons, the show has been a fractured mirror to Adlon’s own life: a single mother, a working actress, and a collector of passionate, loyal friends. As such, it’s a tour de force of intimate, personal storytelling. Adlon directs every episode, and even details like the clothes her character, Sam, wears and the paintings that decorate the show’s house are her own. The stressors and the pleasures that weave through each episode feel like they’re hers, too—because they also feel like they’re ours.
Better Things has a bemusement about everyday life and everyday things, when so much comedy seems cynical about it. It’s comforting to watch a TV series that’s not necessarily escapist, but also not too brutally real. It makes you feel a little less crazy about getting through the day when you watch Sam try to get through hers. You’re transported into reality, not out of it.
Daily battles are waged with compassion and an open heart, but Better Things doesn’t retreat from the unpleasantness that manages to infiltrate, despite our best efforts. In some ways, everything is placed on an even playing field. What are our family’s finances and what’s going to happen when mom dies and where can we park near the restaurant and also what the fuck are NFTs? In Sam’s world, they’re all equal, and equally impossible to answer.
There are times when, in the chaos of life, Sam will pause and see her child, her mother, or her friend. Maybe they’re also in the midst of a personal crisis, doing something frantic or exasperating or otherwise preoccupying. Maybe they’re doing nothing but just living—which is to say doing so much, even if there’s a brief instance of stillness.
In these moments, Sam seems to grind to a sudden halt—as if time stood still, the heavens parted, and a ray of sunshine is illuminating this person she loves. She can’t help but notice them. Life is forcing her to.
She sees them, and she cracks an easy smile. It’s as if all the things she knows about this person, admires so deeply about them, despises about them, or makes her feel so close to them overwhelms her. The smile is a spasm. A reflex. It’s a charge that crosses space and time and laws of physics—the way emotions do—and electrifies her, because she and them are connected.
It’s the smallest little thing, but each time, as it has for the last five seasons, it makes me cry. Can something break your heart and make it stronger at the same time? Is that possible? Maybe it’s this thing where, by tearing it a little, the scar tissue grows and now you have this heart that’s resilient, fortified, and bigger for more feeling, more loving.
These smiles are important because it means life is happening. It means it moves on. It moves past the fights, the petty ones and the really big ones. It moves past the tense phases, just as it moves past the honeymoon phases. It moves past both the arguments about homework and the sweet kisses good morning; both the divorces and the great sex; the days that went well, the ones that felt like they took a year off your life because they were so impossible, and the ones that were unmemorable and mundane.
The moving on is never easy. In fact, it usually isn’t. You lose things and you gain things on the way, but you are still there. You make it through.
It seems so simple, but it couldn’t be more unfathomable to process, especially on a daily basis. That’s why I can’t resist those moments where Sam smiles. I’m not sure she realizes what’s happening in those moments—what she’s feeling and what it means for a person drifting through. But it’s a beautiful, invaluable reminder that it is happening and may even be happening to us, every day. The moving on, the feeling our way through life, is so natural that we don’t notice it. What a comfort to, through this show, remember that.
There are other things I’ve turned to recently for a similar feeling of catharsis. Bridget Everett’s HBO series Somebody Somewhere is an exquisite example. Station Eleven was gorgeous. Even something like Encanto, which was so emotionally honest about what it means to be a part of a complicated family and unsure of who you are within that, did the trick.
But now I’m so thankful to have Better Things back, though I’ll be so gutted to see it go.
For more, listen to Better Things’ Pamela Adlon on The Last Laugh podcast.
