<i>Better Things</i> Is Almost Perfect Television

The finale of the first season of Pamela Adlon’s FX dramedy ended with Sam (Adlon) and her daughters driving around in the family minivan, the girls gazing out the window while Duke (Olivia Edward), the youngest, squeezed her mother’s hand. The track playing in the car was Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed,” and all three of Sam’s kids sang along. It was a fitting ending for a debut series that had concerned itself singly with what women and girls go through, filtered through Adlon’s own experiences as a single mother and an actress. Sometimes it was funny (Sam memorably threw a teenage co-star out of her car after he tried to show her his penis, adding as a mom-like