Review: Better Things on FX
I'd seen the first episode a couple years ago while searching for a new show to marathon. I thought it looked promising and wanted to see more. I liked Pamela Adlon’s Sam Fox right from her first scene. In jumping from one streaming service to another, it got lost in the shuffle.
Fast forward a few years later, I re-found Better Things last month. Like other things, timing can be the difference This time around, watching the first episode got me hooked and returning. The details of Sam’s life with her three daughters as a working single mom pulled me in as I'm adjusting to the reality of becoming a working single mother myself.
Watching Sam’s day to day makes me feel less alone. Moments of the show resonate in ways that would have missed their mark on me in the past. Some similarities are uncanny, like managing her aging mom’s memory problems. Or that moment when her eldest daughter Max says “Come on Mom, Frankie is a boy.” Sam slides down into a sitting position in a room by herself. No words. I felt her facial expression within my own face as I thought of my own 13 year-old daughter changing his name and identifying as a boy. Only in that private moment alone can Sam absorb her realization. No words. Her facial expression conveyed it all with an honesty and credibility that would’ve been lost on me three years prior.
When Sam finds herself alone at a hotel on a beautiful beach scene for a weekend away, a “break,” she rents a car and drives to pick up each of her daughters and bring them back to her beautiful escape. My son had asked me this past summer if I’d prefer to go away alone to take a break, to get rest after the chaotic and painful past year of betrayal and separation, of becoming the primary parent with a lost co-parent creating more harm than support.
When he asked, I’d considered for a moment and quickly realized, my joy is with my kids while they are still living with me. A beautiful place would be lost to me without sharing it with them. So the three of us went on our first annual summer getaway as three instead of four. I felt my inner happiness watching my kids engaging in the beautiful surroundings just as Sam did, although her version shone amidst the backdrop of cinematic lighting and a moving soundtrack.
The show paints glimpses into moments of this age, be it getting a colonoscopy or managing symptoms of menopause while caring for kids and parents at the same time.
When Sam says to a friend, “This is the best we’re ever going to look,” or when she has repetitive sexual dreams of her ex-husband, I can feel the weight of sadness and loss in her eyes.
Pamela Adlon has done a tremendous job of conveying the joy, the sadness, the humor; the immense weight of responsibility, the exhaustion, the endless multitasking and worries, the feeling of getting an impossible number of things done in a given day while still always feeling like you’ve come up short. And at the same time she eloquently shows us the incredibly light and deep moments of joy and beauty, laughter, love and connection.