Pamela Adlon: ‘Maybe some knuckleheads will watch Better Things and something will shift’

As her semi-autobiographical comedy bows out after five superb seasons, the actor, writer and director talks to Kevin E G Perry about the joys of filming in London, discovering her Ukrainian heritage and gently changing the world

Pamela Adlon: 'I always say that FX was paying for my therapy’ (Pamela Littky/FX)

Pamela Adlon is standing in the sunlight in her Los Angeles office, and she is surrounded by whiteboards. They’ve been neatly divided with yellow tape into 10 equal sections. Each represents an episode of the fifth and final season of Better Things, the wise, heartfelt and very funny comedy series the 56-year-old has written, directed and starred in since 2016. Cryptic headings, scrawled in black marker, deliver a taste of Adlon’s joyful, profanity-spiked sense of humour. “C***ceptionist”, reads one. Another, in big capitals: “VERY GAY”. She steps back to take it all in, tugging the sleeves of her black sweater over her hands. “This is the entire season,” she says, emotion seeping through the trademark gravel in her speech. “It’s gonna be hard for me to wipe these boards.”

Adlon has been making a living from her unique voice since she was nine years old. For decades she was best known for prolific voiceover work, including her Emmy-winning role as pre-teen Bobby Hill on long-running animated sitcom King of the Hill. Her husky tones, once described by The New Yorker as sounding like a “child chain-smoker”, have given life to characters everywhere, from Rugrats to Rick and Morty and Big Mouth. However, it’s as the writer and director of Better Things that Adlon has finally been able to use her voice in the fullest sense. The loosely autobiographical show began as a meditation on single motherhood, but over its 52 episodes has blossomed out to take in life, the universe and everything. “I always say that FX was paying for my therapy,” jokes Adlon of the network that hosts the show in the US. “But also I’ve always wanted to have a talk show, and I’ve always wanted to be a teacher, and I’ve always wanted to be a coach.”

In Better Things, Adlon finds an outlet for all those impulses. She stars as Sam Fox, a lone mother of three daughters living in Los Angeles and scratching out an uncertain living as an actor and director. Her home is warm and full of art, and her truculent British mother Phyllis – or rather Phil (played by the always magnificent Celia Imrie) – lives next door. It’s a show about finding meaning and purpose in the everyday, where the simple act of cooking a hearty chilli for one’s family takes on the significance of religious ritual. “It’s a way to live your life, in a way,” says Adlon of the series’ meditative message. “You don’t have to just sit in a cold room with four walls and a light bulb. If you take the time to do certain things and live your life a certain way, you’re going to be saving yourself money, saving yourself time, wasting less, living better.”

Adlon with Celia Imrie in season five of ‘Better Things’ (Suzanne Tenner/FX)

One of the best things about Better Things, and the hardest to describe if you haven’t seen it, is how it barely feels like it’s been written at all. It parcels out its intertwined stories through lived-in vignettes, with a pace and tone that couldn’t be further from the familiar rhythms of a traditional sitcom. On a recent episode of Adlon’s Better Things podcast the actor Diedrich Bader, who plays Fox’s best friend Rich, described how he was wrong-footed the first time he turned up to work on the show and had to modify his performance from “sitcom” delivery to what he called the “rhythm of life”. For Adlon, the key to writing a show that doesn’t feel like conventional television is the same as the secret to being a great voice actor. “You listen,” she says. “Do people talk like that? As a voiceover person it certainly helps to be able to act and to have something distinctive about your voice, but for me it’s about my ear. That’s what’s kept me going. If something feels false, or hits your ear like tin, it’s not gonna work.”

Of course, an important factor in how true to life Better Things feels is how much of it is drawn directly from Adlon’s own experiences. Her own elderly mother really is British, for example, and lives nearby. Adlon’s time going through the lengthy bureaucratic process to gain British citizenship in January 2020 inspired a season five episode where the whole family does the same before decamping to London to visit relatives. “I loved being there so much,” says Adlon. “The news cycle when you’re not in America is about the world, as opposed to the way we eat our own assholes out in America. The diversity in London hits you like a tonne of bricks. You’re walking around, looking at the monuments, and you’re like: ‘Wait, these people aren’t immigrants. They built this f***ing town!’”

Adlon’s character Sam Fox gains British citizenship, as the actor herself did in 2020 (Suzanne Tenner/FX)

That idea resonated in a season that explores, in Adlon’s words, “where we come from, and the people who came before us”. In the first episode, Sam and her brother trace their genealogy back to Ukrainian Jews, a moment based on Adlon’s real-life appearance on the investigative reality show Finding Your Roots. “It took five years for them to crack my DNA,” recalls Adlon. “So I finally went, and I was waiting for him to tell me whether my dad’s side of the family was from Russia or Poland. When he said Ukraine to me, it was not on my radar at all. I put it into the show, and then the f***in’ world…” She trails off incredulously. The episode first aired in the US four days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “It was nuts.”

Another storyline, about an abortion, took on added relevancy after the overturning of Roe v Wade. “It was always just a storyline; I never thought that 50 years of precedent was going to be undone in front of my f***ing face,” says Adlon with disbelief, adding that she’s been astounded by how her deeply personal show has ended up touching on so many of the world’s most fractious topics. “We call the show ‘the portal’,” she says. “We’ve got Ukraine. We’ve got abortion. We’ve got gay [rights]. We’ve got anti-monarchists. We’ve got it all!”

For those of us who care about any or all of those issues, this can be an anxious time. Adlon understands that, and feels it too. Better Things is her optimistic response: a salve for the world’s ills, and a cathartic laugh when you need it most. “I don’t know why everything’s going backwards,” she says thoughtfully. “Hopefully the show will be some comfort food to the people that it matters to, but also maybe some f***ing knuckleheads will watch Better Things and something will shift.”

Better Things season five is available to stream now on BBC iPlayer in the UK and FX on Hulu in the US