Better watch it

• Published date: 19 July 2022
• Publication title: Signal

I was in America this February for an indulgent holiday — you can tell a lot about someone who chooses to holiday in America, I think, so enjoy whatever insight you have just gleaned about me — and happened to be there for the Stateside launch of the final season of Better Things , which was everywhere. Everywhere. Every time I went for a stack of IHOP pancakes, a triple-width Better Things billboard was staring at me. Every time I was in an LA hotel room trying different exotic flavours of Pringles in bed, Better Things trailers and interviews were playing at me from the TV. Conversations with Americans — so often about how baseball lasts 10 hours but ‘‘in a really good way’’ — turned inevitably towards the final season of the show. What is it about this dramedy that has the US in a headlock

To get it, you have to watch a couple of episodes, I’m afraid, but once it clicks, it really clicks. Co-created by, written by, starring and based loosely on the life of Pamela Adlon (Californication, Louie, the voice of Bobby from King of the Hill), Better Things follows actor and mum-of-three Sam Fox as she clatters around LA and tries to string enough acting and directing gigs together to make some sort of income — all while constantly batting up against her mother, Phil (played elegantly as ever by Celia Imrie). It has lots of everything — in its ‘‘wisecracking mother who has a cool relationship with her daughter’’ sequences it’s quite Gilmore Girls; in its ‘‘padding around an LA mansion and sometimes having weird interactions with strangers’’ parts it almost approaches Curb Your Enthusiasm; with its family dynamics it can touch on Modern Family, but without the constant sports days and casual generational wealth. Every episode has a scene where Pamela Adlon makes a big mess in a kitchen. It’s that kind of show.

What really makes it stand out is how elegantly it fits into the incredibly vogue ‘‘drama-comedy’’ genre (which we will move on from soon, I promise you: commissioners will get bored) without ever succumbing to either being too dramatic or too comic. It’s strange but it works: all of the moments of drama are those things that seem huge inside a family while they’re happening, but never need to be mentioned again — a quickly resolved fight over a Saturday dinner table, a teenager starting to mentally move in a very...