Why Better Things is more than just Louie for moms

Pamela Adlon once called Californication (which she was on for seven seasons) "a big piece of candy," and Louie (which she's written, produced, and acted in) a "salty pretzel." Better Things, her new show premiering Sept. 8 on FX, is beef jerky: tough, meaty, and smoked. Adlon plays Sam, a hilarious, hardscrabble hustler who spends every minute she's not acting or doing voice work in Hollywood taking care of her three daughters, her two dogs, and — when time permits — herself.

Better Things shares a lot of DNA with Louie (Louis CK wrote and directed the pilot and is an executive producer for the series), but the differences tell. Being a single mom in L.A. isn't much like being a single dad in New York, and if both CK and Adlon's shows are about talented figures on the periphery of celebrity — or responsible single parents who remain "real" partly because their careers never fully broke through — their experience of time couldn't be more different. Louis CK's character Louie struggles with loneliness and fills his empty hours by skewing existential, or philosophizing, or masturbating. Adlon's character Sam has no empty hours. She tries to masturbate, but there's no privacy, no time, and no space: "I'm dating my daughters; they're my love life," Sam says to Constance Zimmer. This is a horrible little sentence. (It's also not 100 percent true.) But, however off-putting and inappropriate and sweet, it really crystallizes Sam's unsustainable baseline. You can't keep those constraints and remain vibrant. And Sam is vibrant: Adlon is a magnet whenever she's onscreen. It's not easy to watch her fraying.

Better Things isn't as cinematically ambitious as Louie, but it makes wily use of colors and interiors — and cosmetics. Sam's house is full of clutter and giant lamps and cozy, friendly greens (fun fact: The green sweater Adlon wears in the pilot belonged to her dad). Her relationships with her daughters are sometimes indexed by the colors and styles they wear, and Sam's green couch feels as gently symbolic as Louis CK's series of red couches in Louie. Comfort matters to Sam. That's not typical in Hollywood.

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Neither is the fact that scenes featuring Sam in the makeup chair, getting ready to go on set, are fascinating without being particularly transformative. The makeover — that legendary trope in movies that makes the good girl great — gets no purchase here. We watch people slather Sam in makeup and pack her into uncomfortable clothes and nightmarish shoes, but the effect is atypically oppressive. We might admire her cleavage or how her eyes pop, but all in all, we're eager for her to change back into jeans. Given how beauty works in Hollywood, that's quite a trick.

TV moms have it rough in this culture. There's something about the word "mom" that activates viewers' snobbiest, most condescending instincts. It isn't much better for actors: TV mom roles are almost always cloying and thankless. (They're almost as dull and predictable as TV wives!) Better Things sidesteps a lot of this problem; even though it takes motherhood as its subject matter, this isn't really a "mom show" any more than Louie is a "dad show." Sam's a mom, but in practice, she's incapable of the kind of resignation it takes to say "I'm dating my daughters" and mean it. She texts exes. She looks for porn. She sees friends and banters with makeup artists and yells at her own mom (played with drunken whimsy by Celia Imrie.) She deals with the discomfort of fame and the problem of not having enough of it. Hers is an overfull life, and if Sam is struggling to stay upright in the twin hurricanes of Hollywood and parenthood, it's a struggle worth watching.

Better Things is wry and deadpan and sometimes kind of brutal, but Adlon is so good at playing tough that it's glorious to watch her break down. You just really want her to get up again.