Better Things

Better Things is a semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about a working actress and single mother raising three daughters in Los Angeles while shepherding her aging English mother across the street — a portrait critics almost universally describe as one of television's most singular and accomplished achievements of its era. Nearly every review centers the same astonishment: that a show about the mundane, unglamorous labor of a middle-aged woman — the cooking, chauffeuring, bill-paying, arguing, and loving that mainstream television has largely treated as invisible — could be rendered with such ferocious wit and such startling emotional power. Adlon's total authorship (she wrote, directed, produced, and starred, running the show herself) is treated as the engine of that achievement, with her performance singled out again and again for its 'sagacious pluck' and its refusal of sentimentality. Critics repeatedly reached for landmark language: the show has been called a masterpiece, named to multiple best-of-the-decade lists, and won a Peabody Award for its first season.

The show's style is its signature and its limitation. It is deliberately episodic and anti-climactic, assembling loosely connected vignettes of domestic life — 'like you've always just had access to someone's naturally non-linear thought processes' — rather than driving a plot. Critics who admire this (the large majority) praise its refusal of false sentiment and its 'allegorical beauty'; those who resist it describe the same qualities as aimless, meandering, and occasionally self-indulgent, especially in later seasons' formal experiments (a silent-film interlude, a mock-Instagram sequence, extended dream spaces), which split reviewers between those who found them transcendent and those who found them showy. Its history with co-creator Louis C.K., removed after his 2017 misconduct admission, hangs over the earlier seasons' reception; critics overwhelmingly concluded that the show emerged from that rupture as more fully and unmistakably Adlon's own.

Thematic consensus is near-total: the series is a multigenerational meditation on women's invisible work — the exhaustion, love, and volcanic anger of caregiving — and it treats aging, illness, and mortality with unusual directness, finding 'a lot of funny in the darkness.' The sharpest critical disagreement is less about quality than appetite: viewers and critics who need plot machinery found it diffuse, while those who prize observational truth-telling ranked it among the best television of the decade. Tellingly, the show's audience scores, though strong, run below its near-unanimous critical consensus — a gap that reflects the patience it demands more than any failure of execution. The final season was greeted as a near-perfect landing, with critics emphasizing that the show ended at its peak, 'not slumping toward the finish line.'