Each day, on the set of her show “Better Things,” the director and actor Pamela Adlon retreats to a small room while the cast and crew eat lunch. She turns off the lights, shuts down her phone, removes her pants and her bra, and lies face down on a couch. Often, she falls asleep. Adlon is a single mother of three daughters, as well as one of the few showrunners who direct, produce, write, and star in their own series. This makeshift sensory-deprivation room is often the only opportunity she has to generate new ideas.

One afternoon in September, during the filming of the show’s third season, Adlon was directing a scene in which her character’s increasingly absent-minded mother, Phyllis, who lives next door (as Adlon’s mother does in real life), barges into her kitchen. Adlon’s character, Sam Fox, is hanging out with her brother and a couple of friends, cooking a meal. After a take, Adlon, who likes to describe her show as “handmade,” darted behind the director’s monitor to review the footage. The cast broke for lunch, and she retreated to her chamber of solitude.

Adlon, who is five feet one inch, hunches constantly. She loves to call people “bro” and has the energy of a hyperactive teen-ager, but she also has a tendency to lumber about, brows furrowed. She looks prepubescent one moment and geriatric the next, and that makes it difficult to guess her age, which is fifty-two. She likes to come up behind her cast and crew, reach up, grab them by the shoulders, and march them over to whatever she wishes to show them. She emerged from her break and took Celia Imrie, who plays Phyllis, aside. She had decided that she wanted Phyllis, whose cognitive abilities have gradually flagged over the course of the series, not to recognize one of the friends, Rich, played by Diedrich Bader. Instead, she would think he was “a handsome, sexy man” to flirt with, Adlon said. “Even though he’s gay.”

After the next take, Bader left the set, appearing stricken. In 2017, his father died, after struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. “Alzheimer’s patients are trying to prove, like drunks, that they’re fine,” Bader said. “Before, it was a light, frothy scene about the mom not liking the risotto. And then she sprang this on me and didn’t tell me she was going to change the way she did it. This show, it’s a fluid thing.”

Adlon, however, felt that she had crossed a tonal boundary that didn’t suit the show. “It was very intense,” she told me the next day. “Now we’re getting tragic. And I always have to remember that my show is a comedy.”

“Better Things,” which airs on FX, is concerned above all with realism. “Smaller is better,” Adlon said. The show is loosely the story of a middle-aged single mother of three daughters who is also a working actor. Like Adlon, Sam is not starved for roles, but casting directors are not chasing after her, either. Sam is lewd and indelicate, but the show has a gentle way of exploring how a single mother in the entertainment industry must juggle her friends, her aging mother, her work, her shoddy romantic prospects, and the needs of her precocious, headstrong children. It is a sitcom in the lineage of shows such as “Girls” and “Insecure”—and “Louie,” which Adlon co-wrote and guest-starred on. It expresses a character-driven point of view rather than following a narrative arc. Many such shows land on unsettling or unresolved notes to affirm their commitment to truth. Adlon, though, is not afraid to make feel-good television. “It always feels like these are real choices being made, and it is, at the end of the day, a very life-affirming, heartwarming show,” Dan Cohen, one of the executive producers of the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” told me. “The show isn’t made with a grudge.”

“She did something that every writer is supposed to do, but they never actually do, which is write the show that only she could write,” Tom Kapinos, the creator of “Californication,” said. In 2007, he cast Adlon in the pilot of that show as Marcy, a foulmouthed aesthetician. Kapinos had no long-term plans for the role of Marcy, but he admired Adlon’s unflinching capacity for raunch and kept her on as a permanent cast member. (He said she became his “gutter muse.”)

“He won’t bite, but he carries with him a large repository of judgments.” Facebook

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Even in the age of autofiction and the television auteur, “Better Things” is particularly autobiographical. Adlon initially considered tweaking the central character to distinguish between Sam’s life and her own—“to make her a manicurist, or have a gay brother living in the back yard, or something,” she said—but eventually she decided that the details of her own life felt the most resonant. Sam lives in a shabby-chic home in the Valley, ornamented with an eclectic collection of trinkets and art made by friends. (Adlon picked out the art that crowds the walls of the house built to stage the show.) One of the few points of deviation between Adlon and Sam is that the fictional character is more vocal about her feelings. It’s satisfying to watch Sam snap at her children, her mother, colleagues, or strangers, as if Adlon is reacting onscreen in ways that she is unable to in real life. In an episode of the third season, which will begin airing on February 28th, Sam takes her daughters to drive go-karts. Just before they strap in, Sam’s daughter Frankie asks, “Do you want to ride the go-karts, or not?” Sam turns to her and says, “No, I really don’t. But I’m trying to give you guys a fun childhood, and, at the same time, to not die or get paralyzed.” (Adlon once took her children go-karting, and got whiplash.) Later, when the girls are arguing over who will ride home in the front seat, Sam tries to solve the problem the way Adlon’s mother once had: she instructs them to spew the meanest, foulest possible remarks to one another for exactly one minute. “It was a great defuser,” Adlon told me.

One of the revelations of “Better Things” is that children are the people least sensitive to the plight of their parents. Sam’s daughters are blithely indifferent to her struggles. Adlon is not afraid to convey that most of the emotion generated in the act of parenting is not love. “I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen my mom stay at home and relax,” Gideon, her oldest daughter, told me. “I can remember when she’s had a breakdown because it’s been too much. All of us have been really difficult.” Gideon, who is twenty-one, has moved out of her mother’s house twice—once for a brief stint at college and once to her own apartment in Hollywood—before promptly returning home. Gideon’s best friend, who works as a member of the art department on “Better Things,” also lived at Adlon’s house for a while. “My mom is a charity,” Gideon said.

When television audiences hear the word “showrunner,” they often assume that that person is responsible for the majority of the creative decisions on a show. But there is a carrousel of professionals involved in any production—there are the writers, the directors, the executive producer, and the stars. Adlon spins all these plates at once. She has evangelized to other showrunners the importance of directing. Issa Rae, the creator and star of “Insecure,” wrote me in an e-mail, “She’s always exhausted and claims it’s worth it, but I don’t want that life. She’s great at it and loves to challenge herself more and more every season.” Rae added, “No thanks.”