Matching classic rock songs with contemporary television or film settings can be risky pop-cultural business, which can backfire and make both entities feel cheapened and exploited — e.g., the creepy feeling of hearing the Beatles’ “Revolution” on a car commercial. But somehow, opening the sparkling and hip new FX show Better Things with John Lennon’s great song “Mother” feels just right. At the heart of this show is Sam Fox (a mother) and her trio of daughters. But whereas Lennon bemoans his fate with an MIA mother — “Mother, you had me / but I never had you” — Sam’s daughters have their mother, on some new, revising-as-it-goes terms.
Better Things, cocreated by naturally charismatic comedian Pamela Adlon and her pal comic guru Louis C.K., (and named, incidentally, after the Kinks song of the same name) really is one of the better things on the new TV-scape. A refreshingly subtle, periodically audacious, and deliciously odd new variation on the age-old family sitcom paradigm, it sits somewhere of its own clever devising, a strongly female-driven dramedy off to the left and right of Ward and June Cleaver family values and the eclecticism of Modern Family.
(Reality “been there, doing that” check: Adlon is the ex-wife of Felix O. Adlon, son of the famed German director Percy Adlon, and has been raising their three daughters since a divorce in 2010).