For both Adlon and Sam, dating in middle age is a nuisance that must be extinguished quickly each time it pops up. “I don’t think dating is gonna be part of my life,” Adlon told me. “I say this line in my show this season: ‘I’ve aged out of men like kids age out of the foster-care system.’”
In 2006, Phil Rosenthal recommended Adlon to the producers of “Lucky Louie,” a short-lived HBO show written and directed by Louis C.K. The show was, in many ways, a dry run for FX’s “Louie.” “Lucky Louie” had a more conventional format than its successor—it was a multi-camera sitcom filmed before a live studio audience—but it hinted at the ways in which television creators could deploy their biographies and points of view to deconstruct a tired genre. C.K. played a broke, sexually frustrated mechanic married to a nurse. At the audition, “I was brought in up against all these blondes and cute women,” Adlon told me. “And he says he wanted to cast me because I was a mother of three, and that was interesting, and he knew I would have stories to tell.” In the first episode of the series, C.K.’s character masturbates in a closet while his wife, Kim, played by Adlon, gives their daughter a bath.
“Lucky Louie” was cancelled before its second season ran, but Adlon and C.K. had become close. Together, they wrote a pilot that was rejected by CBS and Fox. But FX picked up another show, “Louie,” with Adlon as a writer, and it began airing in 2010. The series was her first exposure to a new way of making television—one in which a single person could exhibit complete creative control over a project. But, as much as the show represents C.K.’s vision, it is indebted to the sensibility of Adlon, who helped serve as a proxy for the female characters who enter Louie’s orbit. When C.K. was writing an episode in which his character goes out on a date with an overweight woman, he called Adlon and asked her for dialogue for the woman. “I said, ‘Tell her to say, “I got my period when I was nine,”’” Adlon told me. When the episode aired, in 2014, the Washington Post described the woman’s monologue as an “epic, mesmerizing speech.”
Adlon guest-starred on the show as one of Louie’s dear friends, with whom he is also in love. They have a cat-and-mouse relationship. She repeatedly resists his overtures. One night she is babysitting his daughters and, when he returns home, he tries to force himself on her. “This would be rape if you weren’t so stupid,” she tells him, more exhausted than afraid. “You can’t even rape well.”
“Louie” won two Emmys for its writing. “There was an immediate sophistication and coolness to it. She just hooked up with the right person,” Allee Willis said of Adlon’s relationship to C.K. “Because she was involved in so much of his work, I think that translated over when she finally got a chance to do her own thing.”
Like many networks, FX wanted more of the kind of deconstructed, personality-driven shows that C.K. had pioneered, but ones that featured the perspectives of people of color and women. The network tried to buy Aziz Ansari’s “Master of None,” but lost a bidding war to Netflix. At the time, Adlon was acting in a major-network television show—“a big-budget show for NBC or ABC, one of those,” she told me. (She has had so many parts in the past four decades that they blur together.) “I was doing an arc and a Friday turned into a Saturday, and I was, like, ‘What the fuck? Don’t they have kids? Don’t they want to go home?’ I remember being on set that day and thinking, I’m ready. I think I know how to run a show.” C.K. pitched Adlon as a showrunner, and the first season of “Better Things”—with C.K. as Adlon’s co-writer and executive producer—began shooting in the spring of 2016.
“This is what I would call, in business terms, arbitrage,” John Landgraf, the C.E.O. of FX, told me. “It’s about finding a masterpiece hidden in plain sight that might have been overlooked because of biases we have carried forward in our industry and our society.”
“You’re the one who wanted to go someplace off the beaten track—you ask him what’s gluten-free.” Link copied
Adlon likes to say that the challenges of single parenting equipped her with the skills necessary for running her own show, and she exudes a maternal energy on her set. When someone is sick, she is sure to suggest a remedy, which is typically homeopathic. “I want to hear your sinus-infection story!” she shouted across the set at a crew member one day. When I had arrived, I had been presented with a reusable water bottle by an FX representative, who explained that single-use plastic bottles were not permitted. Between takes, Adlon took colloidal silver for her own sinus infection. She is fixated on food, and on making sure that her cast and crew are fed properly. On set, there is kombucha on tap, and, the day I visited, a food truck arrived midafternoon to serve bowls of cucumber and mango with chili salt to the cast and crew. “Food truck! Food truck! Food truck!” Adlon yelled, like a middle-school softball coach.
Despite the familial environment that Adlon has tried to cultivate on set, “Better Things” has experienced major setbacks. “A million horrible things happened, and then other fucking earth-shattering, terrible things happened,” Adlon told me. For the first season, FX hired Nisha Ganatra, who has worked on Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and Jill Soloway’s “Transparent,” to direct seven episodes. It eventually became clear that Adlon should be directing the show, but the shift to install her was turbulent; in Adlon’s words, it was “a fucking shit show.” (According to Ganatra, there was always an understanding that Adlon would take over directing duties.) The Directors Guild of America has rigid rules in place to prevent executive producers or other employees of a show from replacing directors, and a grievance was filed. “That got really bumpy,” Ganatra said. FX hired Lance Bangs to “smooth the transition,” Adlon said. (“They had to hire some guy, and that was a little disappointing,” Ganatra told me.)
After the first season, Adlon was nominated for an Emmy for acting, and she received a Peabody Award for the show, as well as the go-ahead to direct the second season. As a director, Adlon prefers warm, natural light. She has instructed her camera crew to watch John Cassavetes movies and take notes; she has a fixation on Cassavetes’s ability to make “conversational, documentary-style films,” she told me. “Like a fable, based on reality.” She shoots the minimum number of takes possible to nail a scene; this is partly so that she and her employees can get home to their families. She likes to let her shots linger even when the dialogue is over, allowing the scene to wallow in its own awkwardness or tension.
For a decade, it seemed as though Adlon and C.K. were a well-matched pair—two disillusioned entertainers and parents in middle age with equal proclivities for the scatological and the profound. Then, in November, 2017, just before the finale of Season 2 aired, the Times published a report detailing a pattern of sexual misconduct by C.K. Several women said that he had exposed himself and masturbated in front of them. These reports had been circulating for years, albeit on blogs, like Gawker, making them easy enough to dismiss as gossip, for those who wished to. (If there is any theme in C.K.’s work, it is the plight of the chronic masturbator, something he explores at great length in most of his television and standup work.) A few days before the news broke, C.K. phoned Adlon and warned her that “people were calling people he knew” about reports of sexual misconduct. Although Adlon was his closest collaborator, she says that she was not contacted by any reporters. FX cancelled its extensive deal with C.K. and his production company. “What’s happening? What’s happening?” Adlon remembered thinking.
In one of the many phone calls between Adlon and C.K. “to process,” Adlon told him that she, too, would need to sever ties. She gave him a preview of the statement she would release: “My family and I are devastated by and in shock after the admission of abhorrent behavior by my friend and partner, Louis C.K.” She soon also fired Dave Becky, who managed her and C.K., and who was accused of making threatening comments to some of C.K.’s accusers.
Adlon describes the period after the news broke in the same extreme terms as she does the time of her divorce. (“These men,” she said, her voice dripping with disgust.) “I’ve had a few 9/11s in my life, including the real 9/11,” she told me one evening, driving her Audi Q5 S.U.V. from her post-production studio to dinner at a hip Thai restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. “It felt like the world was ending,” she said. “I was his champion and he was my champion for ten years.” She paused. “And then you’ve got these women, who’ve all been through these things. And you’re, like, what does that mean? What did you do?”
Her concern was not only for C.K.’s acknowledged victims. “I felt like I was going to get arrested,” she said. “I just felt, like, paranoid. That there were people around every corner.” I asked her if it was because she felt implicated in some way, for being so close to C.K. “No,” she said. “It’s not a logical feeling. I just didn’t want to go outside.”
She continued, “I felt enormous empathy for him. And for any woman whose reality is that somebody fucked her up. Because I’ve been there.” I asked her if she meant with C.K. specifically.
“Oh, no. You mean, did he do this to me?” Adlon said, and shook her head. I pointed out that she had appeared in multiple shows with C.K. that explore unwanted sexual approaches and compulsive masturbation. “Ewww!” Adlon shrieked. “Don’t say ‘masturbation.’ Oh, my God!” C.K. seems to be the one subject that draws squeamishness out of Adlon.
“If I name-checked any people, of which there are, who did fucked-up things to me,” Adlon said, trailing off. “You sit there, and you go, ‘I don’t want my name to be linked with their names for the rest of my life. I don’t want to go after somebody’s family.’” She reconsidered for a moment. “Are they a predator? Can this happen to somebody else? Then you certainly have to speak up and say something.”
Adlon felt that the furor about C.K. had become unproductive. “I wanted the world to calm down. I wanted a conversation to happen,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything that can compare with a massive public shaming like that.” Mostly, she has been frustrated with what she describes as the “flying shrapnel” of the news. “It was another example of extremism happening in my lifetime,” she said.
In C.K.’s silence—he also declined to comment for this piece—the people, particularly the women, being forced to answer for him are his colleagues. Adlon said, “Anybody who has any association with him is peppered” with questions. “Sarah Silverman is his fucking spokesperson.” At the Toronto International Film Festival, Chloë Grace Moretz, who was in the film “I Love You, Daddy” with C.K., “got murdered with Louis questions,” Adlon said. “She was trying to promote her movie.” Even Gideon Adlon was asked about C.K., during the run-up to her début feature film, “Blockers.” At the Emmy Awards last September, where Adlon was one of the nominees for Best Actress, she avoided red-carpet interviews in order to dodge questions about C.K. Now every time his name pops up in the news—which is increasingly often, since he has made a foray back into standup comedy—she asks the people around her to refrain from talking about him. “I just need to focus,” she told me. “I don’t want to have to weigh in on his sets.”
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Adlon, who had never written for television without C.K., didn’t know if she wanted to make “Better Things” on her own. She told me John Landgraf had said that, because of her association with C.K., her show wasn’t being considered for various awards. “It was, like, I don’t know if I can do this,” she said. “My heart’s not in it.” Nevertheless, FX executives encouraged her to continue. Twice-weekly therapy sessions helped, and Rosenthal coached her on how to continue making the show, including hiring four writers to replace C.K. “I told my daughters that I should make T-shirts that say ‘Bad for my life, good for my show,’” Adlon said.
This season, Adlon made her editing room all female (“our little estrogen chamber,” she called it), and she often points out that most of the show’s major decision-makers are women. During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, the cast and crew staged a mini walkout. Yet these gestures to womb-ify the show can feel like attempts to buffer the unsettling new reality of the series, which is that it was shaped and championed by someone with a grotesque track record of behavior toward women.
At dinner, Adlon begged me to change the subject. I told her that I had interviewed some of the new writers for her show, and had asked if they felt that C.K.’s shadow loomed over the process. All of them said no; C.K. was generally off limits as a topic of discussion. (Many people who are associated with Adlon refer to C.K. simply as “her former writing partner.”) One writer, Joe Hortua, confessed to feeling a sense of anxiety, knowing that he and his colleagues were replacing someone with such a celebrated—and now marred—legacy. I mentioned this to Adlon, and she seemed taken aback. “Of course,” she said. “That’s so interesting. Of course. I didn’t even think about it.”
Recently, I asked Adlon if she’d been aware of the Gawker reports. She paused, sighed heavily, and said that she had. “I was aware,” she said. “There’s certain things— Do I lay everything bare? I don’t know how to respond. All you can do is, when you know somebody you confront them.” I asked if she is still in contact with C.K. “No, I’m not,” she said. “But I hate saying that. If I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I talk to him every day,’ or ‘No, I’m not,’ both are awful. But I haven’t spoken to him in quite a long time.”
One afternoon, I met Adlon for lunch at a quiet dim-sum restaurant, where she did what she always does when being served food or drink (even at the Emmy Awards, last year): she negotiated with the waitstaff about their use of plastic straws and containers.
“Do you want something to go?” she asked me as the plates were being cleared. I said yes, and she turned to the waiter. “What are the containers made of? Are they paper?”
“It’s Styrofoam. You don’t like those?” the waiter asked.
“You have another kind?” she asked him. He nodded. “Thank you, sweetheart!” she said, overjoyed. “I give everybody a hard time,” she said. The waiter returned to the table with a plastic container, which was unsatisfactory.
