What I’m Watching: Better Things

Better Things: Season 2, Episode 4 “Sick” (B)

I feel like this show is very quickly becoming much more like “Louie” in that it’s prone to emphatic openings that don’t connect too much to the rest of the episode and unresolved moments that show how lonely people feel. Phyllis going after the boy with the mustache in the bookstore turned into an unexpected situation that she couldn’t escape, and we saw a bit later on in the episode that she also couldn’t remember where she parked her car. She’s far from the most memorable player on the show, but she does explain a lot of how Sam got to be so callous and fed up with the world to the point that she would become physically sick when a relationship was starting to go well, presuming that the only viable option was to end immediately. Diedrich Bader’s Rich turned out to be a helpful voice of optimism, gently mocking Sam for always assuming the worst and encouraging her to take care of her stomach in a way that didn’t affect her love life. The final segment of the episode provided an unexpected appearance from the girls’ father, who, even after receiving a text message begging him not to from Sam, put it on her to decide whether or not he could stay for dinner. It’s strange to see how the girls, especially Frankie, who seems so mature most of the time, react around him, and of course the best response to him being there was Sam bluntly shutting the door on him while he was in the middle of the sentence