Inside a nondescript concrete building built in the 1970s by a citrus fruit company, Pamela Adlon shouts from behind an office door. Her voice—that unmistakable voice that sounds like a mixture of prepubescent boy and smoker's rasp—fills the nearly empty floor. There are stains on the rug from workers past and abandoned cubicles, but now the building is home to at least six television shows and movies, including Adlon's show, Better Things, which premieres this week on FX.

Adlon bursts from behind the editing room door to welcome me and shows me to her office. On the door there is a small printout with a typewriter and a quote from Flannery O'Connor: "I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say."

The office's interior looks like a college dorm room, like I imagine Adlon's room at Sarah Lawrence looked or felt like for the one semester she attended. A Tibetan tapestry hangs on one wall; on another is a painting by the artist Slutface. There's a gray, worn leather couch in the middle of the room with a few throw blankets, an African drum in one corner, and a hefty wooden desk stands imposing but nearly untouched in the other. The air smells of patchouli and incense. Notes for this and the presumptive second season are tacked next to relics and art made by her three daughters on a makeshift corkboard. It's a weaving and never-ending display of all the work going on and all the things on Adlon's mind as she tries to organize her life and show.

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With our time short, and Adlon working at breakneck pace, I place my recorder on a stool in front of us as we sit on the couch. She pulls her feet up and I ask if I can record our conversation. She agrees, but the recording is a bust; the file corrupts and I forgot—as a nightmare the previous night predicted—to set out a backup. And with Adlon's non-stop schedule, as she rushes to get the show edited and ready for its September 8 premiere, there is no time for a follow up. She's the busiest she has ever been, and it shows as she moves at Daytona 500 speeds.

Adlon is working endless hours on the first season of Better Things. The show revolves around a middle-aged, single mother of three daughters trying to navigate her personal life and acting career while being a parent. She's the creative force—the star, writer, director, and voice—behind the show, which is FX's first female-driven comedy.

Pamela Adlon and Louis C.K. backstage during the 66th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards. Christopher Polk/NBC Getty Images

"I think for our comedies we want to find things that are funny and also really about something, that have a really strong point of view. If that's the definition, [Better Things is] a total bull's-eye," Nick Grad, President of Original Programming for FX Networks and FX Productions, says. "I don't think we feel like we are in overtly male network, we just want to have great shows. I think we're thrilled we can put on a female-lead comedy, but I think we're trying to make something that are really great and distinctive and original."

Better Things came out of a collaboration with her longtime creative friend, Louis C.K. The pair met at the turn of the century when Adlon auditioned for Louis's short-lived but influential HBO show Lucky Louie, in 2006. The Honeymooners-inspired show lasted one season, but it created an enduring bond between the pair. The two have been linked since, with Adlon helping write, produce, and act in episodes of Louie—for which she's been nominated for three Emmys.

The recognition for her work and a chance to have her own show has been a long time coming for Adlon, who turned 50 in July. Her career began as a nine-year-old when she started making appearances on her father's television show. Don Segall produced and helped create The Dave Garroway Show, which eventually became The Today Show, and Adlon would spend her days on the soundstage and even appear in some of the show's kid-centered skits. By the time Adlon was 16, she was acting in her first made-for-TV movie Little Darlings and appearing as Dolores Recheck in Grease 2. The next year she got a recurring role as Kelly Affinado on The Facts of Life.

Her career seemed set in stone, but Adlon didn't wait around for her next role. She took up jobs wherever she could, including a flower shop in New York City. One day her agent walked in asked her what she was doing working behind the counter. Adlon could only think about how he hadn't found her more work.

FX

Adlon's career really blossomed on the radio. Her voice became her job, and Adlon's radio success led to voice-over work on television. Her voice would become synonymous with some of the most recognizable animated characters in the Saturday morning line-up, like Dewey Duck on Quack Pack and Ashley Spinelli of Recess. But the role that set her apart was Bobby Hill on the influential Mike Judge show King of the Hill, for which she won an Emmy in 2002.

Breaking into voiceover work in Hollywood is notoriously difficult. It's a tight group of actors who specialize in making the world believe that the animated pictures on the screen are living and breathing, their voices and emotions rounding out characters and making them three-dimensional. Adlon has been a mainstay in the group for most of her career. It's the thing that's given her work even when she jumped full on into mommy mode in when she had the first of her three daughters.

Adlon has a feisty streak that shows up in her characters and in person. It's a spunk and scrappiness that makes them endearing and believable.

Adlon has a feisty streak that shows up in her characters and in person. It's a spunk and scrappiness that makes them endearing and believable. She may be small in stature, but she doesn't give an inch to anyone—an aspect of her personality that dates back to her childhood when she would stand up for her friends or people to whom she he felt the world was doing an injustice. When Adlon was in high school, she "wailed" on a classmate who made fun of her friend, who was hearing impaired. The boy on the other end of the beating mocked her friend and she wasn't going to let it stand. That mixture of compassion and aggression translates on screen—and it's something that lives in her world of no-bullshit.

In interviews, Adlon isn't afraid to speak truth to parenting. For example, Adlon worries about what her children see, but she doesn't try to control it. She knows they have smartphones and the Internet, and if they want to watch something that might haunt them, they can and will. It's naive to think they won't. Instead, Adlon tries to instill a sense of realism in her three daughters, like trying to instill a no-asshole policy, especially when it comes to driving

A few days before our sit-down, a fire truck passed Adlon and her daughters. They were in traffic and everyone pulled over to let the truck pass as its lights flashed and horn blared when, inexplicably, a car pulled out from the line of stopped cars and drove past everyone who had obeyed the law and pulled over. Her daughters were screaming in the car and Adlon slowly talked them down, trying to push them past worrying about things that are out of their control.

FX

Because of their creative relationship, Better Things has been branded the female version of Louie, but the show drifts far from the world of Louie. Where Louie revels in the absurd—helicopters taking a woman home after a date, a horrific and haunting recurring nightmare, or the unexplained escape from seeing a dying father that includes a motorcycle and a speedboat—Better Things lives in reality and honesty. Adlon is the show's driving force; she holds nothing back both as its creator and star. Its honesty and ability to live in the dark and still find the laughs in those moments felt more real than any full episode of Louie.

It brings me back to reading Anne Lamott's book Operating Instructions, a collection of her journal entries from her son's first year of life. Lamont raised her son alone while working a full-time job, and the honest portrait of the feelings and emotions she lets breathe on the pages have no place in standard television sitcoms about a family. It's the place Adlon wants to be. The book is one of her favorites, and as I struggle to pull the name of it out of from the recesses of my memory, she grabs her phone and brings up a photo of the cover.

Lamont's portrait of parenthood hits places not many other people are willing to journey. It's the same places Adlon is willing to go with her show. Better Things is about the life of a single mother of three girls working in Los Angeles and trying to keep herself afloat. But unlike most shows that depict motherhood, Better Things doesn't take the easy way out of what it's like to be a mom. The show revolves around Hollywood, but it lives in the real world. Adlon has to fight all the typical battles of being a woman in Los Angeles, but she also has to balance that with being an actor, which means portraying characters or doing things on screen that she doesn't want her own children to see. It's a struggle that Adlon has lived herself. She played Marcy Runkle on the lewd and sexually charged comedy Californication for seven seasons. That show, about a disillusioned and struggling writer and his family and friends, touches on topics like BDSM, squirting, and even statutory rape, with Adlon's character often in the fray.

FX

Better Things can get just as dark, but perhaps less confrontational. It's an honest portrayal of parenting with all the tiny details that come with each small and surreal battle. There are no easy punchlines or laugh tracks. It's a show built around the emotions that come with parenting, the highs and lows. Being a parent has its moments when the joy feels like it's going to set off a bomb in your heart—but it also has its moments when tears and rage swell up in equal measure. And the swing can happen in a second.

On Adlon's wall of inspiration, there is a picture of her as a child standing next to her father in a park. It's a print out of the old photo on a piece of paper. It's a beautiful photo depicting parental love. In the photo, Segall is wearing a green cardigan sweater that could only come out of the '70s—that pale forest green that matched so well with the orange shag carpets that populated homes when the turbulent '60s turned into a calmer, if still politically fraught, decade. Adlon wears that very sweater the first episode of Better Things. The sweater hangs off her, too large for her small frame, but you can tell by the way it rests on her body that it's more than just a sweater. It's something that makes her feel at home. Instead of feeling pale or worn out, it shines on screen when Adlon wraps it around herself and curls up into bed next to one of her daughters. Sam, Adlon's character, has too many chores to finish, but her daughter wants her to lay in bed with her as she goes to sleep. It's a rare and real moment for parenting on television—one that comes midway through the first episode.

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