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Positive:
78
Mixed:
4
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
Mar 1, 2022
Season 5 Review:
Presenting each episode as a visit instead of a story makes the show feel more lifelike, accentuating the growth of Adlon's creative assuredness since she took the reins from the collaborator with whom she worked for the first two seasons. ... More than ever, though, it trusts the audience's intimacy with who these people are by enabling them to grow.
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Feb 28, 2022
Season 5 Review:
Whether you’re the kid going off to college or the unmoored mom weeping into her unfiltered sake about it, you’re doing something you’ve never done before. It has been such a pleasure to watch this family grow up, and so illuminating to witness, through their eyes, how that process never ends.
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TV Guide MagazineFeb 25, 2022
Season 5 Review:
Better Things is the perfect mix of sweet and sour, finding unexpected moments of joy - Sam's fangirl gushing during a random encounter with children's TV legend Marty Krofft - and punctuating them with a flash of random terror and despair. [28 Feb - 13 Mar 2022, p.6]
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RogerEbert.comFeb 24, 2022
Season 5 Review:
What a sendoff it is. ... “Better Things” understands the agony and joy of these tiny chapters—the “ephemera” Phil so quickly wants to toss aside—and plays them for all their under-appreciated importance. Adlon remains one of TV’s most fascinating performers, and Sam one of its most compelling protagonists. ... But for all its ruminations, “Better Things” never forgets to be funny, suffusing even tearjerking moments with a sly, droll warmth that cuts through the waterworks.
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RogerEbert.comMar 5, 2020
Season 4 Review:
Brilliant. ... The writing on this show is so smart in that the characters don’t all sound like mouthpieces from the same writing team as happens on most mediocre sitcoms. ... There’s a theory that TV and film needs to always be about people with lives more interesting than our own. What Pamela Adlon understands is that there’s equal value in presenting people as truthfully as possible, and thereby allowing us to see our own interesting lives reflected.
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Mar 4, 2020
Season 4 Review:
One of these days Emmy voters will notice that when it comes to half-hour TV direction, the thing Adlon is doing here, week in and week out, is astonishingly attentive, empathetic and, when it wants to be, hilarious. The show is loose, but never scattershot and Adlon's directing confidence is equally evident in how the camera navigates around the Fox home and in how well the entire series plays to the strengths of its actors.
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Mar 2, 2020
Season 4 Review:
Season four of Pamela Adlon’s FX series Better Things, created, directed by, and starring Adlon as an actress and a single mom raising three eccentric, steel-willed girls, boasts four episodes that are stone-cold classics, endlessly rewatchable and rewarding. The rest of the season is pretty good too — so nervy yet exact that it makes almost every other American TV show, even excellent ones, seem formulaic and timid in comparison.
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Feb 28, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Better Things is the kind of intimate show that captures the characters' mundane expressions of love, frustration, and loneliness so accurately that you forget about the art and effort behind them--the sensitive scripting, the genuine acting, the respectful direction.
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Feb 27, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Season three of Better Things continues to be exceptionally great without him [Louis C.K] — precisely because this is Adlon's experience and POV via a TV show that mirrors aspects of her own life and conveys what she fearlessly wants to put out in the world about being a woman, being a mother, being a daughter. And all of that is keenly evident in this new season, with even more development of her directorial skills.
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Feb 27, 2019
Season 3 Review:
A series that’s funny, empathetic, and experimental all at once. The eight episodes made available for review also seem to think about the inevitability of change, and what it means to handle change with grace. ... The magic of Better Things is that Adlon is telling, and making something striking in the process.
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Feb 27, 2019
Season 3 Review:
As the confident new season unfolds starting Thursday on FX, you see the number of themes the premiere has casually established: aging, growing up, freedom, dependence, mortality, responsibility, the flowering and wilting of life, all at the same time. That’s all — just human existence, the labor of love. And there is nothing on TV today that represents it better or more gorgeously.
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RogerEbert.comFeb 26, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Adlon is more concerned with character and truth. Better Things has that element that commonly comes with great fiction in that it feels like we’re dropping in on lives that existed in the months since this show was on the air. It’s like visiting old friends — some of it is funny, some of it is dramatic, some of it is silly. And we can’t wait till the next time we get to drop in.
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IndieWireFeb 26, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Season 3 is an evolution inspired by many but guided by one constant voice. Adlon packs her series with touching moments, hilarious set-ups, thoughtful reveries, heartbreaking choices, and relatable circumstances, all explored through unique, perceptive perspectives. ... Better Things is the best of us, and even in February, it’s likely the best TV series of the year.
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Feb 22, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Everything about Better Things feels personal, and yet somehow vastly relatable to anyone who has ever loved a child, agonized over a difficult parent, endured an unsatisfying job, or wondered whether pushing their own personal rock up the hill yet again was really worth it.
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Feb 19, 2019
Season 3 Review:
The third season of Pamela Adlon’s Better Things is the best the show has ever been. Even when the characters are hurting themselves, being petty and hypocritical, and otherwise making a mess of things, it’s a pleasure to watch because so much care and thought have gone into each frame and line.
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Sep 13, 2017
Season 2 Review:
The masterstroke of Better Things is that it ignores 98% of what mainstream television has told us about how families operate and how grown women relate to the world. It is simply truthful about the ambiguous burdens of adulthood, about feeling love, exhaustion and sometimes volcanic anger for the people you can’t live without. By eschewing false sentiment and embracing uncertainty and moments of unexpected empathy, it ends up being deeply affecting.
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Sep 11, 2017
Season 2 Review:
I didn't think Better Things could get any better. It's thrilling to be wrong. [15 Sep 2017, p.66]
Sep 2, 2016
IndieWireSep 8, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Adlon has more than earned her time in the spotlight, and her voice is what makes Better Things fresh, vibrant and real. Next to the rest of fall’s crowded lineup of new TV, it’s unlikely you’ll find a show as refreshing, nuanced and confidant, nor will you witness a talent as consistently sharp as Adlon herself.
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Sep 7, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The show has a keen, charming grasp of the way parent-child relationships can sometimes fluctuate between screaming and hugging with no transition in between, and some of the most effective Better Things moments are brief cutaways to quiet times amidst the fighting, or vice versa.
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Feb 28, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Ms. Adlon’s Sam Fox—former child star, working actress, single mom of three, plaything of a perverse and wrathful universe—remains one of the most original and daring female characters in the annals of TV comedy. ... As regards the question of whether to watch, the answer is a resounding yes.
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Feb 27, 2019
Season 3 Review:
It’s an experimental season, one whose subtle shifts seem more suited to film than TV—and might be easier to appreciate on a streaming service than in 12 episodes spread out over three months. .... Like [John Cassavetes, she’s making choices bold enough to alienate some viewers—ones that introduce a voice strong enough to stand on its own.
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Feb 22, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Each episode feels like a compelling short story, or a collection of theme-linked tales, toggling between topics both deep and juvenile...And the atmoshere feels so lived-in and inviting - even when the girls are being awful, which is most of the time - that this newfound emphasis on plot feels like a bonus for getting to spend time in Sam's company. [Feb 2019, p.88]
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Feb 19, 2019
Sep 14, 2017
Season 2 Review:
Better Things gets better--truer and deeper--when Sam is taken by surprise (as when her ex-husband shows up unexpectedly for dinner, or when a pet dies) or when she’s jolted out of her self-absorption by a parental obligation that yields a small revelation for her. Adlon is very good at depicting Sam in mid-mixed-emotions.
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Sep 7, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Adlon’s performance is so good, you get--and want--her in nearly every scene, just to see how she’s going to react: to this kid’s temper tantrum, to that rude producer’s snarky comment. It’s a star vehicle that feels like it’s introducing you to an entire family--and an entire universe you want to inhabit.
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Sep 7, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Better Things isn’t merely adding a foul-mouthed maternal entry to the Bad [Insert Title Here] franchise. Sam and her kids are flawed, but that just means they line up more closely with actual human beings. Adlon might be best known for her voice, but in Better Things, she puts a face on a real mom.
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Mar 5, 2020
Season 4 Review:
The feeling of intimacy and empathy in the parenting scenes remains superb, particularly during a Sam/Max argument in one episode that involves every woman’s least favorite word. But it’s not a coincidence that both Sam and Better Things often seem lighter and happier when she gets some grown-up time, turning her gaze outward to learn about other people’s triumphs and heartbreaks.
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Mar 11, 2019
Season 3 Review:
It’s most resonant when it treats its heroine as a moral mixture. When, a few episodes in, it begins to dive into Pamela’s messy unconscious, it deepens, hitting on disconcerting themes about sex and loneliness. The show’s moody, jazzy style, its reliance on the unexplained image, can border on pretension, as jazzy things so often do, but it lingers in your mind, agitating in a good way.
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TV Guide MagazineFeb 14, 2019
Season 3 Review:
And yet for all of its barbed and scatological humor--be warned, there's a colonoscopy episode--there's an unvarnished honesty to Better Things that has a way of grabbing and moving you just when you least expect it. [18 Feb - 3 Mar 2019, p.15]
Sep 8, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Better Things isn't groundbreaking when judged merely as a single-mom sitcom, but it finds its freshness in how Adlon examines it in her personal world; the stories and struggles are familiar even though they are contained within a world most people aren't part of, and she makes whatever daily struggles she faces with her family relatable.
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Sep 8, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The purity of feeling in Better Things weaves their stories together in such a way that feels warm and real. Yet many of the most successful moments within the five preview episodes made available to critics stem from Sam’s professional and personal lives crashing into one another.
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TV Guide MagazineSep 2, 2016
Season 1 Review:
A traditionally funnier show, a distaff Louie. ... Adlon's sardonic sensibility is perfectly suited to a show that preaches female empowerment while delivering a blunt reality check. [5-18 Sep 2016, p.22]
Sep 1, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Where “Louie” is frequently taken by flights of fancy and an inexhaustible curiosity about why the world is what it is, “Better Things” is, so far, more focused on the Fox family’s daily grind. The world is full of puzzles, but Sam and her daughters largely leave others to the solving.
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Feb 28, 2022
Season 5 Review:
The throughline for all these characters remains truthful, but the show’s pacing this season is uneven. Granted, Better Things has never adhered strictly to linear narratives or the traditional arc of a 30-minute episodic. There’s more of an emphasis on moments and feelings over plot.
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Feb 23, 2022
Season 5 Review:
The show’s best scenes have always been rooted in the feelings of ambiguity that parenthood and work evoke, and yet at times Season 5 of “Better Things” seemed to be actively withholding catharsis or key insights. ... In the main, I respected this show significantly more than I liked it for the first time.
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Sep 7, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The low-key, observational style of the humor in Better Things may leave you restless, and there are moments when the show veers into cuteness or sentimentality. But the show’s real payoffs have less to do with laughs than with aching recognition of the single mother’s plight.
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Mar 2, 2020
Sep 7, 2016RogerEbert.comSep 6, 2016
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