FX’s ‘Better Things’ Season 5: TV Review

A new season of FX’s Better Things is like a visit to the eye doctor.

Any 10-episode stretch of the show is five hours of seeing through writer-director-star Pamela Adlon’s lens, an experience that inevitably tweaks and adjusts how you view your own relationships with your family, your city, your job.

Relatability isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for great art, but we reach for it, whether it’s comparing anything tied to the media or the wealthy elite to Succession or connecting so many completely unrelated things to Harry Potter that “Read Another Book!” has become the stuff of memes. But it requires no stretching to apply Adlon’s boundless empathy to the small victories and defeats in your own life.

For five seasons, Better Things has been a gift, a perspective of probing personal specificity and detailed universality, littered with moments and insights that pop up in the most unexpected of everyday interactions. This last slate of episodes represents Better Things at its best, with Adlon offering one final refinement on how to see her world and ours — complete with laughter and almost guaranteed tears — before going off to the next step in her storytelling journey.

As I’ve said in attempting to write about past seasons, reviewing Better Things is a strange exercise. Plot hovers over and around the series, but not in a way that you could really spoil. Thematic threads weave in and out loosely, but not in such a way that you’d look back and go, “Oh right, Season 3 was the one about,” dunno, “the dangers of climate change” or whatever.

If I were to try to tell you what the fifth and final season of Better Things was about, the best I could do is “shpilkis.” For the non-Yiddish speakers among you, that’s a word that refers to a sense of all-consuming anxiety, perhaps less specifically directed than “tsuris,” but in the same ballpark.

Adlon’s Sam Fox is experiencing a lot of shpilkis this season, as is her brother Marion (Kevin Pollack), as are Sam’s kids Max (Mikey Madison), Frankie (Hannah Alligood) and Duke (Olivia Edward), her mother Phyllis (Celia Imrie) and even Marion’s wife Caroline (Rosalind Chao).

It’s a general restlessness that will feel recognizable for viewers who have spent the last two years in various forms of quarantine, though it’s interesting that Adlon and her small cadre of writers made the decision not to set this Better Things season in a COVID-19 world. You can sense the real world lurking just off-screen through stylistic modifications like an increased number of FaceTime conversations or scenes shot either on phones or on small digital cameras presumably to minimize crew size. But most of our characters’ primary concerns fit in with the show’s organically creeping storylines.

Although she’s made a push into directing — one that mirrors Adlon’s own career shift — Sam is having her usual professional uncertainties, including a starring role in an upcoming period drama that she isn’t sure she wants to do. Max is craving more independence and she makes a couple of major decisions that shift the direction and tone of the series. Frankie is in a better place emotionally than they were back in the third season, and the character’s preferred pronouns — a subject of debate among fans for years — becomes an ongoing topic of conversation. And Duke returns from a vacation trip with her father (guest star Matthew Glave) with a new tween melancholy and some bad habits.

A 23andMe-style genetic test at the start of the season — one that mirrors Adlon’s own appearance on PBS’ Finding Your Roots — instigates some reflection from Sam, Marion and especially Phyllis, leading to a multi-episode arc in London, which continues the show’s great success with out-of-comfort-zone trips to locations like British Columbia and New Orleans.

Mostly, the final season of Better Things does Better Things things. Sam’s love of art and cooking remain front and center. Sam and Adlon’s shared love of Hollywood and Los Angeles remain key hooks, with visits to several local landmarks, some well-known and others obscure. There are still regular big-name guest stars and cameos, sometimes from people playing themselves, though usually slightly tilted versions. (I’ll only spoil notable appearances from Danny Trejo and Ron Cephas Jones, both wonderful.)

With the end in sight, Adlon and her collaborators have given these 10 episodes perhaps a clearer sense of unification, planting seeds throughout that either pay off powerfully or offer clever grace notes as the conclusion nears. Individual episodes of Better Things have always functioned as beautiful short stories, but this may be the most that a full season has worked that way as well, maintaining the series’ trademark looseness and tying the series together with a bow at the same time.

The show’s missteps are so rare that the occasional episode that feels perhaps a hair too sitcom-y stands out; the eighth episode, featuring guest star Casey Wilson and a heightened confrontation on an airplane — one that nods in the direction of our COVID-19 realities without making it literal — stands out not for being “bad,” but just “conventional.” It’s one episode out of 10 and it’s a good episode of TV, just not a great Better Things episode. The last two episodes? They’re great Better Things episodes, and the finale is an all-timer.

This closing season is mostly just lovely in all the ways I’ve tried to articulate every season, in case there are viewers holding out on watching who could still be swayed. Over the show’s five-season run, Adlon has become one of the two or three best comedy directors on TV, with an eye for comic timing and sentiment that border on impeccable. If Better Things ends its run and Adlon has never been nominated for an Emmy for her work behind the camera — she has two acting nominations, and even that’s insufficient — it will go down as one of the TV Academy’s all-time biggest misses.

The problem is that there just isn’t room for Emmy voters to properly recognize Madison’s wide-eyed vulnerability, Alligood’s stylish fragility and Edward’s impressive maturation. Imrie is always wonderful, and the penultimate episode in London gives her what ought to be her best awards showcase to date. And that’s without getting to invaluable contributors like Pollack and Chao, more central than ever and better than ever, as well as Diedrich Bader. Adlon has built a deep ensemble and a beautiful television finale, and the parallels between her achievement and what Sam has done throughout the show are at the heart of the final season.

The fifth season of Better Things is the best TV show of the year thus far, and it’s sure to find a place high on whatever lists I’m making in nine months. It’s been a treasure to watch this show for five years and to have this show impact the way I see everything around me in the way the best of stories can do.

Source: Hollywood