How Pamela Adlon is transcending categories — in life and TV

If you watched Pamela Adlon's new show Better Things on FX, you might have noticed that all the women have unisex names. Adlon's own character Samantha goes by Sam. Her daughters are Max, Frankie, and Duke. Sam calls her mother — a boozy British eccentric named Phyllis, played with scene-stealing verve by Celia Imrie — "Phil."

"They're guy names," Adlon tells me, with her trademark bluntness. I'm talking to her on the phone about the show, which she created and produced (in partnership with Louis CK). There's no particular "hook" to this show. Seen one way, it's about the thick nets of conflict and connection between mothers and daughters. Seen another way, it's one of many Lonely Semi-Autobiographical Shows Made by Funny People, a genre that includes The Comeback, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Louie, Master of None, One Mississippi, Lady Dynamite, and Maron, to name just a few.

If those don't seem like especially compatible sensibilities, that's the point: Adlon has a gift for transcending categories and side-stepping norms. She acts, writes, produces, and directs. And she can voice moms and sons on the same show with peculiar ease. She was King of the Hill's Bobby Hill for 13 years, but she also played a sexpot on Californication and charmed Louis CK's character so completely in Louie that by the show's last season, he'd kind of become her.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Adlon has long been an asset to Louis CK, and not just as a writer and producer. On HBO's Lucky Louie, their first onscreen collaboration, her blunt, intelligent, occasionally aggressive onscreen presence made it impossible for that show (a riff on the traditional family sitcom) to commit to the TV conventions of the repressed slob and his hot repressive wife. (This scene is a classic instance of how radically Adlon reversed those expectations.) Sitcom wives are a known quantity; Adlon would not play to that norm or "stay in her lane" as an actor: She gave Louis CK so much story input she got a writing credit for "Discipline."

This woman's disregard for binaries and TV categories amounts to a kind of aesthetic: The impulse that led her to give her daughters "guy names" also lets her be all things to all people. That's a big theme in Better Things, a family story with no father. Sam is mom and dad. You see her doing stereotypical maternal work, cooking and slicing and cleaning, but almost every episode has a quiet set piece where she's doing domestic labor we think of as "dad work" too: plunging toilets, trying to change the smoke detector battery, pulling the recycling and garbage out to the curb.

"There are so many family shows and sitcoms," I say to her. "Are there any TV conventions you can feel yourself resisting as you're generating this material?"

"Oh, absolutely," she says.

Is "dramedy" the word for this? What does that term mean to her? She won't quite say:

There are parallels between Sam's practical expansion of motherhood into fatherhood and Adlon's thinking about TV, which is moving beyond categories too: "I realized when I was at the Emmys several years ago, and I looked at Kevin Spacey and I thought: His show is nominated for Emmys for television, and it's not even on television," she says. "That's why I'm saying there's no categories anymore. It's kind of like, people don't want to be labeled, they don't want to be called trans or, you know, they want to be gender-neutral or gender-fluid, there's all kinds of descriptions. It's up to the individual."

So is Better Things gender-neutral?

"Yeah, Better Things is totally trans-neutral gender-fluid," she says. "I don't know. It's definitely pro-people."

Unlike so many shows of this kind, Better Things doesn't wear its ambition on its sleeve. It has no use for depressive episodes or epiphanies or dips into the sublime. The show flashes into rage and amusement and resignation, but it can't quite afford the introspection that automatically flags shows as "prestige TV." Neither can Sam, bound as she is by the single caregiver's burden of exhausted functionality. That makes Sam a rare exception at a comedy moment when protagonists are on the edge of falling apart (Aziz Ansari's character in Master of None is another exception). Failure is not an option for Sam. She has to keep it together because she's a parent and there's just no time for self-pity.

If that sounds like a recipe for shallow or triumphalist TV, what makes Better Things so surprising is how it achieves unexpected depths — sometimes by bypassing Sam altogether. (One episode puts you in the uncomfortable position of knowing something Sam doesn't, and never finds out.) "Is Better Things a comedy of exhaustion?" I ask. I want to hear her talk about how tiredness intersects with competence, but she won't. Instead, she says she wanted to elevate the mundane.

I'm struck by Adlon's absolute refusal to either aggrandize her experience or frame it as anything approaching self-pity. "And those kinds of things are just regular life things," she says, firmly. "You know, I'm just telling the story in the way this family relates to it. I just think families are all different, in all shapes and numbers and you know this is the way her family is."

Few creators have the restraint — when describing something as ambitious as Better Things clearly is — to describe what they've made in terms that sound almost like they're shrugging.

"The truth is nothing really crazy is going on. It's just everyday life," Adlon says. "Max" and "Frankie" are family names, not statements. That they give rise to an all-woman cast with all-male names is incidental. These feel like half-truths, but Adlon's approach amounts to a defense of a form of portraiture that illuminates more than it dramatizes, and it's pretty damn refreshing.