Pamela Adlon is huddled in a booth at Art’s Delicatessen in Studio City, staring out the window at the occasional weirdo passing by on a sunny weekday morning. It’s so deserted inside that the staff vastly outnumbers the customers, and Adlon greets each masked waiter who stops at her table as if they are the oldest of friends. I feel like I’ve stepped into a perfectly lit scene from Better Things in which Adlon’s alter ego, Sam Fox—working actor, director, and single mom of three strong-willed kids—takes a breather while shimmying through the chaotic obstacle course of her daily life, trying to keep all the balls she’s juggling in the air.
In fact, Adlon has just finished cutting episodes for Better Things’ fifth and final season, and she seems very serene about it all. She cocreated, produces, writes, directs, and stars in the critically beloved FX series, which approaches the tangled lives of three generations of eccentric, foul-mouthed women with the adventurousness and emotional delicacy of great American indie filmmakers like Robert Altman and Nicole Holofcener. And it’s the first I can think of that treats the invisible, uncomfortable quandaries of a woman edging into menopause as worthy of prestige TV treatment.
When she started developing Better Things more than seven years ago (with Louis C.K., whose name was excised from the show after season two), Adlon says, her life was very different. Her three children (whose age span more or less mirrors her television kids) were all still living at home; now two of them are out on their own. “So I’ve had those culmination moments in the past few years, where I dream about my kids being young again,” she says quietly, tugging at her black shearling jacket. (It’s in the mid-60s—deep winter temperatures for Angelenos.) Adlon can look back at her show and see that she’s been “modeling the way that a person who has been in the industry as long as I have can, all of a sudden, break through at 50, and not be tossed away.”
The daughter of a screenwriter, Adlon has been a working actor since she was a kid; if you rummage through 1980s pop culture, you can find a baby-faced Pamela (then known as Pamela Segall) in The Facts of Life and Night Court, 21 Jump Street and The Redd Foxx Show, Grease 2 and Say Anything… Her voice is even more ubiquitous, turning up in a ridiculous array of popular animated series of the last three decades. Adlon wears this experience lightly, but references to her rough patches regularly pop out of Sam’s mouth on the series. At one point in season four, one of her kids bemoans all the harassment Judy Garland withstood in the studio system. “Who are you talking to? I went through all that too!” Sam snaps in frustration.
“I have struggles every fucking day still,” Adlon tells me. “Being a woman and needing to stand up for myself and to get past my own feelings. If I was a man, how different these past seven years would have been!” she says with a throaty chuckle. “Every single season, I’ve wrapped the show like it was gonna be my last, because I never knew. The whole show is built around the fact that I almost get my foot in the door, and the door gets slammed.”
The door now seems open for Adlon, who is currently developing a number of projects, including a movie based on Ariel Leve’s memoir, An Abbreviated Life. But it will be hard to say goodbye to Better Things, a series that feels like a poetic version of mundanity, crammed with unexpected trip wires and gentle epiphanies. It snakes all over the place and leaves you somewhere you don’t expect—just like my extended conversation with Adlon, in which we talk about menopause, being a child actor, and making the show’s final season.
Vanity Fair: What was it like shooting those last episodes?
Pamela Adlon: Perilous would be the word. I really felt like I was gonna be a piece of cake. Season five! And it was completely not. I guess that it could be that way if you are not trying to achieve something else and if you just want to put it on cruise autopilot.
That is not your way. Every season is so ambitious.
Celia Imrie [the British actor who plays Sam’s mother, Phil] couldn’t get here and [couldn’t] fly, but they weren’t booking the boats [during the pandemic]. My network [execs] at one point got on a “How the fuck do we get Celia here?” Zoom. And they were like, “Well, there’s a boat, but it costs a million dollars.” So we went to England to shoot, to fold her scenes in. I didn’t want to do a season without Phil. One of my executives texted me this morning and said that he loves the season. I was like, can you believe we were talking about getting a boat that would cost a million dollars for getting Celia here, and now we’re on the other side of it, and we have this wonderful season that we built?