Mama bear
On the plane to LA I remembered that the last time I'd visited LA -- in 2018 -- I'd watched Better Things on the plane and really liked it. Pamela Adlon's semi-autobio semi-sitcom about being a working actor and single mom of three girls in the Valley had seemed, then, like a perfect show to get me into the LA mood, and I didn't remember much else about it. Once that trip was over and I was back in my NYC life I didn't think about the show again. Lazily, I'd associated it -- and its creator/writer/director Adlon -- with her former friend Louis C.K., who co-created the show and is still credited for that at the beginning of every episode, even though Adlon cut ties with him and started doing the show by herself three seasons ago (the current season is its fifth). I didn't want to put in the effort to think past that association, and I didn't want to think about C.K.'s career (ie, that he still has one) because I knew if I started thinking about that I'd spiral, filling with rage about all the ways that men who've been "metooed" have emerged unscathed. Unwittingly, I let this keep me from checking back in with this show that I had liked. BIG mistake! HUGE! And luckily, now rectified.
One of the things I miss most about pre-kid life, pathetic as this seems, is binge-watching TV. Sometimes I listen to my favorite podcast and hear the hosts talking about the many shows they watch and feel white-hot jealousy at the mere idea of sitting down and watching three episodes of a show on some random weekday night. We have been cursed with bad sleepers who not only go to bed late but also wake up most nights needing something or other circa the brain-ruining hour of 4am (too early to just get up, too late to full get back into the type of sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, like, at ALL.) So one of the best things about my solo trip to LA to visit Ruth, apart from seeing Ruth and eating at Gjusta three times, was getting to watch AS MUCH TV AS I WANTED every night and go to bed extremely late and still wake up at a sort of decent hour, West Coast time.
So I had this very intimate, vulnerable, joyous experience watching Season 4 of Better Things, sort of like what happened the last time I was able to wolf down a whole season of TV in one sitting. That being said, still -- guys, I have to say that I think this season of TV is a work of transcendent perfect genius art and everyone involved in making it should get a Nobel prize, probably? At the very least? It also maybe goes without saying that I had gone to the LA bespoke weed store, and so was much more high than I would ever be if kids were on the premises, which made the experience of watching the episode where Sam goes to the weed store and accidentally gets too high and her daughters have to take care of her truly immersive, 360, almost VR.
If you aren't familiar with the concept of this show I suggest reading Carrie Battan's profile of Adlon and Alexandra Schwartz's review of Season 4, though I would save the latter til after you've watched it because the description of Sam's fight with her eldest daughter Max minorly spoils one of the show's tensest, funniest, realest moments. Ok but if you haven't already clicked away I'll do a quickie gloss: Sam Fox, played by Adlon, has (like irl Adlon) made her living in Hollywood since childhood and comes from a showbiz family, and she lives with her three daughters in a big beautiful Spanish colonial style house for which I strain to find a better adjective than the abhorrent "funky" (but it IS, in the best way.) Most of the show's conflict is about the kids struggling out of and back into the nest, but there's also plenty of room for storylines about Sam's professional dramas, which give us a fascinating glimpse at what life is like for successful-but-not-famous actors. Sam always has a gig, but she still has to hustle, and her sets are never depicted as glamorous or even humane places to work. People recognize her every once in a while and she's kind, grateful and humble about it, except when they're dicks. Her life is full and rich. She has not had a romantic storyline (or, that we know of, sex) since season 3. Other characters fall in and out of love, flirt with waiters, reunite with exes, get accidentally knocked up, etc but Sam literally doesn't have time for any of that. She has transcended, or maybe repressed, that part of her personality. Asked to introspect by a therapist in season 3, she says "ew." It is interesting to think of a writer creating a character based on herself who has this relationship to exploring her own interiority. (I still haven't really puzzled out the implications there, but IT IS INTERESTING).
Sam is a magical, complicated and lovable person who palpably loves her kids. Her kids are often dicks to her, which she puts up with and chafes against in equal measure. She spoils and coddles them and sometimes comes down hard on them, but she also makes her home such a welcoming place for them that their friends, who sometimes camp out there for days, call her "Momma Sam." She has the gentle but no-bullshit demeanor of someone for whom utter self-possession has long been the only viable option. She's the same person to everyone, in all situations -- she always has her game face (and her raccoon eyeliner) on. She has chatty, non-fake relationships with her former nanny and her gardener that would strain credulity in a character less fully developed; she asks after everyone's family and never sucks up or talks down. But if someone crosses her -- her ex-husband, for example, or a bitchy parent at school -- that person is DEAD MEAT. And if someone makes any of her kids feel bad, whoa. That person will rue the day!! Sometimes this backfires, like when her youngest daughter Duke befriends a boy who'd formerly bullied her and asks Sam to get over it -- after all, Duke has. But Sam can't help herself -- she yells at the kid and his mom, makes a scene, and humiliates Duke. Still, I can't help but imagining future Duke reflecting on this: "My mom always stood up for me," I imagine her saying to a future therapist. "Even when I didn't know how to stand up for myself. And while it was often embarrassing, I guess I'm grateful. She showed me that you don't have to be liked to be ok."
As you can tell, these characters are very real to me. The show's Nobel-winning genius lies therein, I guess.
In one long, loose, dreamy sequence early in Season 4, the camera lingers worldlessly as Sam wakes up and makes her sleeping family a full English breakfast, complete with beans and fried tomatoes. There's maybe a full three or four minutes of this. It's 100% just breakfast-making. It doesn't further the plot. No one comments on the breakfast, and we don't see anyone eating it. The pleasure is just in watching Sam, sure-footed in her beautiful kitchen, chopping and frying and preparing for the day. It's hard work and no one sees it, and no one has asked for it. But Sam does it because she likes to and because she can -- it's part of who she is.
Am I a Sam-like mom? I don't really know. It's hard to know what "kind" of mom you are. I do aspire to be a protector, not to roll over and be femme and appeasing when people are dicks to me or my kids, but of course I fail at that all the time. "Why are you using your shy voice?" Raffi says to me, like, all the time. (My "shy voice" is the one I involuntarity switch on for all interactions with strangers, and it's awful, upspeaky and an octave higher than my usual speaking voice: "Hi this is Emily Gould? I'm just calling to see if my prescription is ready?") So, ok, no, I do not have a Sam-like ease in the world. But I do have fun with my kids the way Sam does, increasingly -- I feel like that is the best part of this show, how sometimes the tense moments dissolve into hilarity because deep down Sam and her kids do actually like each other (with the exception of Frankie, who really is a bit of an asshole.) And since I started watching this show, when I catch myself shy-voicing out, I think of Sam Fox and try to channel her -- her wide stance, her squinty, bemused demeanor. The way she leans over and exhales forcefully when one of her kids does something that actually hurts her feelings. The way she walks into every situation with a swagger of belonging. The way she is herself, all the time. I want to be that kind of mom, for my kids and for myself.