FX’s Better Things Says Goodbye with Sly, Tearjerking Fifth Season | TV/Streaming

From its opening minutes, season five locks in on its preoccupation with life, legacy, and the cosmic importance of the mundane, taking us through Sam Fox’s (Adlon) morning routine. She checks her blood pressure, starts laundry, feeds her goldfish, all to the tune of Eric Idle crooning the “Galaxy Song” from “Meaning of Life”—itself an ode to our individual insignificance in the face of the vastness of the universe. (We’ll hear another Python song by the time the series is through, but that’s a delightful surprise I daren’t spoil.) 

It’s a tension that Sam’s feeling more acutely than ever. Her oldest daughter, Max (Mikey Madison) is already out of the house and living her own life; middle child Frankie (Hannah Riley), still figuring out their gender identity, scoffs whenever Sam slips into gendered terms; youngest daughter Duke (Olivia Edward) is finally entering adolescence and experiencing the crisis of purpose all young people experience at that age. And all of them are dealing with their crises by withdrawing from their mother all teens do, leaving Sam to deal with the specter of her uniquely-designed LA home—with its dozens of portraits lining the staircase—becoming an empty nest. 

Her contemporaries and elders aren’t much help, either: her mother Phil (Celia Imrie), beginning to accept that she’s in her final years, begins to detach herself from her many possessions (“It’s all ephemera,” she says wistfully). Her brother, the ever-pragmatic Marion (Kevin Pollak), sees little use in Sam dragging him to see a genealogist so they can trace back their family history. “My people come from laborers and hardworking survivors!” Sam cries, desperately trying to envision herself within a continuity that can give her a sense of purpose. Add to that a hectic work life for a working actress in her fifties (which includes a claustrophobic four-hour costume fitting, complete with hoop skirts, for a period piece, and a tense guest directing spot on a Black multi-cam sitcom), and Sam is beset on all sides with the ever-creeping sense that life is leaving her behind.