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In Better Things’ fifth and final season premiere, creator Pamela Adlon’s alter ego Sam Fox and her middle child Frankie meet friends for sushi. They’re celebrating Frankie’s buddy Brigham’s (Aidan Harman) acceptance to Harvard, and Brigham’s mom Fredericka (Angela Kinsey from The Office) starts reminiscing about the adventurous existence she gave up to raise her son. “I had a whole, big life,” she marvels. “And it’s astonishing to me that now he’s going to be gone and I don’t really know what I’m gonna do.” Tears flow, and by the end of the meal she’s falling-down drunk on sake. As Brigham drives everyone home, she curls into fetal position in the backseat, her face pressed against Sam’s shoulder, murmuring “I’m scared.”
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Like so many moments in Adlon’s free-form FX dramedy, the vignette is sad and funny, blunt and tender all at once. And its focal point is the inner turmoil of a person whose feelings rarely get much consideration. Better Things, which returns on Feb. 28, could just as easily be titled What About Mom? For four mesmerizing seasons, Sam—a self-described “working actor” and divorcée with three daughters, though Frankie might not identify as a girl—has struggled to care for her kids and elderly mother, Phil (Celia Imrie in a lovely, under-appreciated performance), with no one around to take care of her. The fifth, an ideal culmination of everything that came before it, uses this premise as a filter for Adlon’s valedictory meditations on personal history, family bonds, mortality and, above all, the constancy of change.
The streaming-driven spike in serialized TV has led to the widespread acceleration of story lines and the compression of narratives into bingeable, contained miniseries. But Better Things, which debuted in 2016 and underwent an unanticipated, largely positive metamorphosis after the departure of…
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Source : time
