The very first scene of Better Things opens with Sam (played by the show’s creator and star, Pamela Adlon) flipping through her phone at the mall while her youngest daughter cries and pulls at her arm. A woman sitting across from her is giving her the stink-eye while the tantrum continues. “Do you want to buy her the earrings? Because that’s why she’s crying,” Sam explains to the stranger. “Because of six-dollar earrings that she has at home already. But she wants them for right now, so. You should go into that store and buy them for her—because I’m not doing it.” The woman continues to silently judge her until Sam relents, gets up, and buys her child a hot dog. By the time the scene ends and the opening credits begin, I can feel the thousands of other moms, like myself, smiling in recognition.

The new half-hour series, premiering tonight on FX, follows Sam, an actress and single parent raising three daughters of different ages: Max, a rebellious high schooler; Frankie, an idealistic preteen; and Duke, her youngest, who still crawls into her bed in the middle of the night. Along with parenting, Sam is juggling her working life in Hollywood (a particularly unkind industry towards women of her age), dating as a divorcée with children, and dealing with her mother, who lives across the street. It might be unjust to call Better Things the best, and perhaps first show on TV to perfectly encapsulate the all-consuming experience of motherhood. (It surely encapsulates fatherhood, too; my husband binge-watched all five screener episodes, too, and was disappointed to learn there weren’t more.) But it’s important to stress how refreshing it is to see a series starring a successful, middle-aged woman raising kids—and paying her husband alimony.

It’s almost unbelievable that a show like Better Things is premiering on FX. The cable network’s focus has long been male-centric, its lineup consisting mostly of violent dramas (Fargo, Justified, The Americans) and bro-comedies (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The League). But FX’s two most successful series are outliers: Louie, Louis C.K.’s experimental meditation on life in New York as a comedian and divorced dad of two daughters; and The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, a dramatic retelling of the 1994 murder case, which made the previously maligned prosecutor Marcia Clark into a feminist hero.

Perhaps the success of these two series played some part in the decision of FX’s president, John Landgraf, to create “a show for a woman,” as Adlon recently told Terry Gross in a Fresh Air interview. C.K. immediately suggested Adlon for the project, and the two long-time collaborators got to work and eventually pitched Better Things, semi-based on Adlon’s life.