“I wanted to see regular-people things,” Adlon says. “Do you want to buy her the earrings?” This would become the voice of the show. When Sam meets the eye of a disapproving onlooker, she turns to her. I’m ready to do this.” She wrote the opening scene, in which Adlon’s character, Sam, sits on a bench in a mall scrolling through her phone as her youngest daughter stands next to her sobbing theatrically. “I got chills, and I thought, O.K., I can do this. But then she did a guest arc on a big-budget show and it hit her: “I looked around and saw all the money and time being wasted,” she says. Between her regular shows and her kids, her plate was full. It was while acting and writing on FX’s Louie that she was given the opportunity to pitch her own show to the network, but she hesitated. Knowing what to take on and what to say no to, making choices, living with consequences-all built up the muscles needed for leadership. Throughout, Adlon was also raising three daughters as a single parent, which ultimately provided the material and training ground for creating and running production on Better Things. She describes sporadic work, at times going on unemployment, before finally getting a break: a voice-over job for radio led to steady voice-over work for animated shows. “I spent years waiting for the phone to ring,” Adlon says. The irony is not lost on her that at the same age her father found his career on the decline, hers began to blossom. A show that, a little over a year ago, seemed on the verge of combustion-collateral damage in yet another MeToo revelation. Or maybe you discovered her in 2016 with the celebrated arrival of her own show, FX’s Better Things, which for two seasons successfully tackled the complex, messy, funny, and poignant emotional terrain that a single working mother of three daughters traverses. You’ve definitely heard her voice-at once distinctively raspy and surprisingly chameleonic-which has given life to a host of cartoons, including 90s kid classics Recess and Rugrats, the beloved Bob’s Burgers, and an Emmy Award-winning stint as Bobby Hill on King of the Hill, starting in 1997. Or more recently: Marcy Runkle, Californication’s delightfully brash resident cokehead, or Pamela, Louie’s fictionalized version of herself. Maybe the first time was back in the early 80s when she was a teenager playing a Pink Lady in Grease 2 or Kelly Affinado on The Facts of Life.
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