9 Quick Questions for Pamela Adlon

Emmy-winning Pamela Adlon — co-creator, writer, star, director and producer of the FX series Better Things — embraces her character Sam Fox’s messy life. On the show, she plays a single working mother raising three daughters and grappling with her own aging, all while managing her increasingly health-challenged mother. In a case of life imitating art, much of the show resembles Adlon’s own life.

Given the show is semi-autobiographical, did your own family say anything was off-limits? 

I don’t think when we started anybody knew how serious this was going to get. It was more like, “Who’s really going to watch this show about my mom?” It’s very respectful, a loving look. What I always say about Sam is that she’s like me in a cape. She’s the worst of me and the best of me. In lots of ways, I learned how to be a better person and a more patient person, because I’ve had seven years with this show, five seasons, to reflect on my life. My kids were all young and living at home when I started this show. Now two of them don’t live at home anymore. They’re all grown.

Does the end of Better Things mark a transition in your own life? 

Some people have asked me, “Does it make you feel sad?” Well, I have been having these feelings for years. You can’t help it — it’s all culminating. A year ago, I was just having dreams about my kids being babies again, and isn’t that the biggest irony? I finally have some peace and I’m, like, “Hey everybody, come back.”

When you were growing up, was there a show that inspired you, a show you never missed?

There were so many. I was obsessed with television. It would have to be Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. I would do a combination of blinking my eyes and trying to teleport myself, really thinking I could.

Is there something you learned in the last seven years doing Better Things that you wish you knew when it started?

I said this in Season 4: “I wish I had done more sit ups.” My God, why don’t they tell you?

But that’s why women of a certain age like your show: You’re 55 and real.

That’s why I did the menopause episode, because I was asking my friends about their experiences and so many people were like, “Don’t tell anybody that I’m telling you this ...” These stories are coming out. That’s why I say in Season 4, “Women need to be brothers to each other.”

Your dad was a television comedy writer-producer. You’ve been acting since 11, with a role on Facts of Life as a teenager. Was show business a given?

I wish I wasn’t so myopic about my career and just waiting for the phone to ring as an actor. It didn’t dawn on me until I was a few years into my show that Oh, my God, this is my legacy. I’m doing what my dad did. I already really admired that, and I always loved being behind the scenes and felt like that was a place for grownups and people who could make decisions. I could never ever even imagine or dare to dream that I could be there.