Pamela Adlon moving on to 'Better Things'

In FX's intentionally eccentric hit “Louie,” Pamela Adlon played a recurring character who was an intoxicating if exasperating presence in Louie's life — an occasional lover who mainly served to deliver Louie a needed dose of his own misanthropic medicine.

Besides getting an Emmy nomination for the part, Adlon, as “Louie” fans know, was integral to the show's success, serving as both writer and producer. (Yes, I am starting to talk about “Louie” in the past tense. Who knows if it will ever return?)

It would be fair, then, to expect “Better Things,” Adlon's frank and funny new comedy that premiered on FX Thursday (with Louis C.K. as its co-creator), to serve up a character much like the one we've already met.

“Better Things” may indeed bear “Louie”-esque traits, but Adlon reaches into her own life story to play a character who is a continent plus a few million more emotional miles away from “Louie's” gray-sky Manhattan gloom. Adlon's character here, Sam Fox, is a new acquaintance who still feels like an old friend — a nearing-50 actress and voice-over artist who is a single mom in Los Angeles providing for her three daughters and her British mother (Celia Imrie), who lives in the guesthouse.

Sure enough, it's about someone who works in the Industry, another in a string of inward-focused TV shows about awkwardness and professional pitfalls as experienced in a particular swath of L.A. Sam is seen working gig to gig, as she has done since her most memorable role in a TV show when she was a child actress.

At auditions, her competition includes “UnReal's” Constance Zimmer and “Modern Family's” Julie Bowen. (Friendly cameos abound in “Better Things”; in another episode Sam gets a supporting role in a project starring David Duchovny.) In recording studios, her voice transforms into cartoon characters.

We follow Sam from those auditions to soccer fields, to a helpless moment searching for graph paper in a Staples, to a fight in the minivan with her oldest daughter, Max (Mikey Madison).

There's not much indication that we're charting new territory with “Better Things.” But it's worth remembering that “Louie” didn't come across as particularly groundbreaking, either, at first glance. The attraction both in “Better Things” and “Louie” is that we are in the hands of terrific writers and actors who intuit the range of human banality and emotions like great jazz musicians.

And the better episodes of “Better Things” draw memorable, deeply felt performances out of the young actors playing Sam's daughters. The show is strongest in scenes between Adlon and this hair-trigger, hormonal trio. “Better Things” may not seem all that original, but it makes up for it with sharp pangs of family intimacy.