“Everything moves, ever forward”: Motherhood and Midlife in Pamela Adlon’s Better Things
This article reads Pamela Adlon’s Better Things (FX, 2016-2022) as the relatively rare television series that foregrounds a mother’s drama, as opposed to that of her child/ren, and thereby represents midlife as a period of ongoing change. More specifically, it draws on discussions of televisual aest...
Wedi'i Gadw mewn:
| Cyhoeddwyd yn: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ges, |
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| Prif Awdur: | |
| Fformat: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Iaith: | Anglais |
| Cyhoeddwyd: |
Genre en séries
2025
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| Pynciau: | |
| Mynediad Ar-lein: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Crynodeb: | This article reads Pamela Adlon’s Better Things (FX, 2016-2022) as the relatively rare television series that foregrounds a mother’s drama, as opposed to that of her child/ren, and thereby represents midlife as a period of ongoing change. More specifically, it draws on discussions of televisual aesthetics, feminist cultural production, and maternal experience and subjectivity in order to explore the series’s representation of protagonist Sam—and, by extension, creator Adlon—as a self in process, developing in dynamic interaction with her career, desires, physiology, and community of family and friends. In the process, it focuses on certain defining features of Better Things, including its fragmented structure, which sidesteps the demands of both episodic and serial form; its maternal aesthetics, which I dub a televisual aesthetics of interruption; and its increasingly greater interest, over the course of a five-season run, in the experience of aging. |
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