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PAMELA ADLON: I despise this term, “badass woman.” I really don’t like it. Because what woman isn’t? I mean,
CATY BORUM: It’s just redundant.
PAMELA ADLON: It’s redundant. It’s like saying, you know, “ATM machine.” You don’t need to say “machine.” You don’t say “6 a.m. in the morning.” You don’t say “badass woman.” It’s a woman. I don’t mind “boss ass bitch.” “Boss ass bitch” is better.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Hey, there. I’m your host, Gabe González. And welcome to We Disrupt This Broadcast where we interview the disruptive masterminds behind the television you love, exploring their work and their experiences in the industry through unfiltered questions, incisive observations, and a little bit of oversharing from me, Brooklyn’s third shortest Puerto Rican heartthrob.
Today we’re speaking to a unique comedic voice that channels an often overlooked demographic in the world of television comedy. Pamela Adlon’s Better Things is a prickly yet tender comedy about a middle-aged woman navigating parenthood, career aspirations and, God forbid, sex. Yeah, you don’t know, moms.
After the break, we’ll get at the heart of what makes Pamela Adlon’s show resonate with so many women, and executive director of the Center for Media and Social Impact, Caty Borum, will chat with her about divorce cake, not waiting for your kids, and the mysteries of menopause.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back to We Disrupt This Broadcast. I’m Gabe González. Women over the age of 50 make up 20% of the general U.S. population, but only 8% of TV characters. That’s pretty shocking, especially considering that men over 50 are also 20% of the population, but like 120% of Congress. So we know women in Hollywood are made to feel like they have an expiration date. How do we confront that? If you’re Pamela Adlon, by making a show about being a woman in midlife that’s irreverent, vulnerable and hilarious. Her comedy series Better Things represents a disruption to TV norms by creating visibility, but also by confronting head on the realities of aging and single motherhood through her singular voice. And her feature directorial debut, the pregnancy comedy Babes, starring Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau, made its world debut at South by Southwest in 2024. Today, executive director of the Center for Media and Social Impact, Caty Borum, talks to writer, actor and director Pamela Adlon. Here’s their conversation.
CATY BORUM: I am so excited to be here with Pamela Adlon, who is so many different things at once. I’ll just start with this idea that really, since the beginning of television, women over 50 have been treated as kind of what I think of as like cultural roadkill. Like, you reach a certain point and they want to just run you off the road and have you stay on the side of the road and, like, stay down. And then Better Things comes along and shows this really empowered, cool, funny woman over 50 who is divorced, who is in menopause, who is raising three daughters and taking care of her mother. And it’s in the nuances of all of that that we get to see this really empowered woman and empowered girls and her funny mom that says whatever she wants. How did people respond to that?
PAMELA ADLON: This is a very good question, Caty.
CATY BORUM: Thank you.
PAMELA ADLON: You did good.
CATY BORUM: Thank you.
PAMELA ADLON: This is good because when I spoke to John Landgraf after they picked up the pilot, he called me and he said, “Okay, this is your dime. I want you to tell me how you see this as a series.” And we were on the phone for an hour, and I said to him, “I want to elevate the mundane.”
CATY BORUM: Yes.
PAMELA ADLON: That’s how I saw my life.
CATY BORUM: Yes.
PAMELA ADLON: And, you know, I said, “I don’t, I have never seen a mom like me on television.”
CATY BORUM: Yes.
PAMELA ADLON: I went to one Lamaze class. I bought, like, a set. I was supposed to go to, like, four. I went to one and I was like, I never need to go back and be in a room with those women. They made me totally crazy and scared me. And I was like, this baby’s coming out of me one way or another, so I don’t need that. I would try to get into like the methodology of being a mom, and I was just always trying to catch up, and nobody was sharing with me.
CATY BORUM: Yes.
PAMELA ADLON: And I was fascinated, I wanted to peep into every person’s house and see what they were doing for breakfast, for their morning rush. And like, I would volunteer at school and I would, like, volunteer at lunch. And I’d look into every kid’s lunchbox and I would be like, oh my God, your mom’s incredible. All the Persian moms made the best lunches. So it was those kinds of things.
What was really important to me, and it kind of goes along with the way my career has been, how my feet are on two sides of the gender spectrum. I’ve always been like, you know, swarthy, tough guy. “Hey, man, I’m a newsie.” You know, all of that stuff that was like when I was an actor. And then in, certainly going into animation and doing, like, natural boy voices and everything. I just feel comfortable that way. So I didn’t want to be representing women.
CATY BORUM: Right.
PAMELA ADLON: And I was resisting that. I was resisting it. And then it dawned on me, you know, I’m directing a scene. I’ve got a guest DP and a guest Steadicam operator. They’re two cowboys. One was from Spain and one was from Kentucky. I could not get their attention, and I looked at my first AD, Sally Sue Lander, and I was like, “Do you, are you seeing this?” And she goes, “I am so used to this.” Like men ignoring women.
CATY BORUM: On the set.
PAMELA ADLON: Yeah, yeah. On set.
CATY BORUM: Yeah. Forget it.
PAMELA ADLON: So then I started realizing, oh, I’m a woman. I’m really a woman.
CATY BORUM: Yes.
PAMELA ADLON: When I hit on the menopause note in season four,
CATY BORUM: That’s where we’re going.
PAMELA ADLON: You know, it’s just like, you know starting with Sam in her underwear, walking around her house, standing under the smoke detectors, going, is it you?
CATY BORUM: Loved it.
PAMELA ADLON: Right?
CATY BORUM: Loved it. My sort of working theory is that Gen X women are turning 50 now and kind of looking around and saying, “Are you kidding me? We actually don’t know any more about this than we did when Maude had menopause in you know, the 1970s?” It’s crazy. So for Sam to come along and if you knew what Sam Fox was doing, when she’s standing at the refrigerator, she’s has the fan in the middle of the night, like, sweating through her shirt. It’s so hilarious if you are a woman in that…
PAMELA ADLON: American Werewolf in London.
CATY BORUM: Yes. And you’re thinking, oh, I recognize that. But to other people they might not know. But so menopause is having this kind of like “it girl” moment.
PAMELA ADLON: Totally.
CATY BORUM: Right, right. It’s very in to be thinking about it. Doctor Jill Biden is in on it. So what was the response to that?
PAMELA ADLON: I didn’t. I feel like. What happened is I went to my gyno, my OBGYN, and there was this, like, I probably have it around here somewhere. I love it as much as my Peabody because it was this, the most disgusting color green like buck slip, like three fold thing that was on the table in the waiting room and it said “the menopause years.” And I was like, I’m embarrassed to be in the room with that thing. I don’t even want to touch that. That’s not me, man. That’s not me.
CATY BORUM: Yeah. That’s horrifying.
PAMELA ADLON: So I took it with me. And I brought it to work, and I put it on the board. I put a magnet on the board. And it would just kind of, like, flicker in the wind every once in a while. And we built this whole season of television. And then I sent the writers off to write drafts. And I’m sitting in the room looking at all the tiles and all the themes and all the stories and “the menopause years,” this really drab, embarrassing green thing is just flickering. And I’m like, what do I do with that? What do I do? And I realized, you know, I need to explore this. So like, I wrote an email to all my female friends and I called it Bellies and Beards. And I said, “Do you guys have the menopause? What is this to you?”
CATY BORUM: Like, do you have a mustache now?
PAMELA ADLON: Yes. Are you, like, angry? Any of the things that happened because I didn’t know. I was trying to understand, you know, and then I had friends who were like, I can’t have sex. It feels like a hot missile of fire is in my vagina. And I’m like, wow. Like everybody had a different thing.
CATY BORUM: Yes.
PAMELA ADLON: Some people would write me and they would say, I would never say this to anybody, but I have to stick a suppository up my pussy. I have to this. I go and I get my beard done, like it was the gamut, and I realized how much shame there is around it.
CATY BORUM: Yes.
PAMELA ADLON: So that’s why I made it like a Philip Marlowe, the confessional. And I made a dark room, and I invited any woman who was like, in my crew or a friend or whatever. I said, we’re going to be at this studio in Burbank all day, and if you want to come and do a confessional, we will film you. And that’s that sequence.
CLIP – BETTER THINGS:
I think it’s the greatest thing in the world to not have a period.
I’ll get it every other three weeks, and I won’t get it for three months.
I never had vagina upkeep before. This is new.
I’m 65. I’m in a relationship for the first time really in my life. He loves me a lot. Tells me I’m beautiful all the time, and not really comfortable with that.
It’s not good. It’s not good. None of it’s good.
I sweat, I’m grumpy.
It’s an inferno coming from deep inside of you.
Putting it on, taking it off, putting it on.
I am comfortable with myself. From the ankles down. I have really good ankles.
PAMELA ADLON: One of my friends flew in from New York, Nell Balaban, and she was hilarious. And it was just like it was so meaningful. I mean, women were breaking down and crying and like my special effects woman, who we call Tumbleweed, she sits down in the chair. She’s like, “I’m 65 years old and I’m having the best time of my life, and sex is great.” And I’m like, what the fuck? It was just like, I’m telling you, I should take all of that stuff and release the outtakes of that, because it was profound. It was profound. I did not think I was doing something revolutionary until the women opened up like that.
CATY BORUM: Yes, yes. Yeah. And like you said, you could feel this kind of collective private shame, stigma, embarrassment. And the fact that you did it also through comedy is also really meaningful because when we experience Sam in her menopausal moment, the menopause years, she’s, it’s funny, right? She’s exasperated but it’s funny. And that takes some of the stigma out, or at least we can lean into it. I can’t even imagine how many women felt seen.
PAMELA ADLON: Well, do you want to see a drama show about menopause?
CATY BORUM: Who wants that? The Menopause Years.
PAMELA ADLON: The menopause years.
CATY BORUM: Has a lady with a beard on the…
PAMELA ADLON: I mean, it’s just like. But for me, I really really like when. After season two, people were, like, thirsty for Sam to, like, hook up. They were like, is Lenny Kravitz coming back? Is Henry Thomas coming back? Robin? And I’m like, oh, people really need Sam to be booed up. So then the real next revolutionary act was a woman can be happy not in a relationship. And she’s great. That I knew was the most punk rock thing I could do.
CATY BORUM: Yeah.
PAMELA ADLON: That she doesn’t have to hookup.
CATY BORUM: Yeah. I want to pivot a little bit because you went there, to talk about it shouldn’t be revolutionary, and yet it is, the revolutionary portrayal of not only Sam Fox as a divorced woman, but what strikes me also that we wanted to talk to you about, is that she also becomes sort of what I think of as really like a divorce doula throughout the show, where she’s helping her girlfriends who are in crappy marriages.
PAMELA ADLON: I love that. I cannot wait to tell…
CATY BORUM: Can you talk about that? Because you’re representing all the different arguments that women might make. You’re representing divorce as a real choice and something that you have to find out about…
PAMELA ADLON: So one of my best friends is Cree Summer, and she’s in my show. And she was going through it, man. You know, she named me. I’m Jupiter the Pan Mighty Heart Patron Saint of Divorced Women. And listen, if you’re going to get a red velvet cake for your daughter because she got her period, you got to have a celebration cake for a woman who has a successful divorce. Because that is like, it’s so hard. Women hold on to these relationships because, you know, it’s like you do it for the kids, obviously. So you get freedom–this is what I call being divorced– because you really have this incredible life experiences when it’s just you. And if you go and you travel, you’re going to meet so many people. And when you’re in a couple relationship, you’re cutting your experiences in half.
CLIP – BETTER THINGS:
Lenny, Lala. This is the guy I used to be married to’s attorney.
What?
Ava Bron.
I thought you were taking us to your attorney.
Damn.
Shit. Now, I know you really love me.
I’m Dee.
Lenny.
Nice to meet you. Hi.
This is Dee Willis. She napalmed my life, and she’s the best.
Thank you.
So you should both hire her to misery fuck the soles of your shitty meat sack husbands.
You’d be surprised how often I get referrals this way.
CATY BORUM: There’s such a cultural stigma that hits women who initiate and push the divorce. And I think that what you’ve done in the show is show this kind of gentle how to manual, and it’s not rah rah divorce for everyone. I love that Sam’s friends represent these different parts of an argument. Like, here’s why you stay, here’s why you don’t stay, and that Sam is very sympathetic to all of it and says, when you’re ready, this doesn’t have to be your fate. And I can’t even imagine how much that meant to so many women. And I wonder if you heard from women saying, thank you for making us feel seen or empowered, or maybe even you maybe gave me the strength to think this was possible for me.
PAMELA ADLON: Well, I hope so. My social media on Instagram is beautiful. It’s such a cool thing. And so I was able to really get the feedback and really from all countries, like everywhere, you know, India, Ireland, like Mexico, like men and women, because I don’t want to just see one side of it. So I have the women who are getting divorced and then, you know, Sam’s friends with a woman who’s like, Sam’s really mad when her husband comes home and he ruins the party, and Judy Reyes plays Lala and she’s like, I’m like, it’s disgusting. He shouldn’t be here. The game ended early. And she’s like, excuse me? He’s my husband. This is his house, too. And if you don’t like it, you get the fuck out. And so you see both sides. I wanted him to have a conversation with Sam. I wanted to hear from the men. I don’t want the men just to be tools. Right. I need to understand what’s going on. And I want to think about what’s going on in everybody’s head. And so certainly the representation to be courageous enough to get out of a marriage that’s not working for you.
CLIP – BETTER THINGS:
You think I’m crazy?
Oh, no no no no no, we don’t think you’re crazy, honey. It’s just hard to watch you keep doing this to yourself.
Do what? Care about my marriage? I mean, since when is there an exact right way to do that? He’s a good dad, and he loves me. And I still love him. Like I got so many options spitting on 50. Am I supposed to start dating again in L.A.? It’s Logan’s Run here.
Yeah, and we’re the dead people.
GABE GONZÁLEZ:
I know the last thing you want to hear right now is a man’s voice interrupting two brilliant women to explain how an ad break works. But we will be taking a quick break and be back in a moment with Pamela Adlon.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. We’re diving back in with our own Caty Boram in conversation with comedian and writer Pamela Adlon. Next, Pamela talks about her new movie Babes, and reveals how real life can actually provide the best comedic material.
CATY BORUM: Pamela, I want to talk about Sam’s mother, Phil, who’s played by Celia Imrie. Phil is charming. She is horrifying. I think she’s eccentric and narcissistic and wacky, but she’s also the sexy sexpot and completely hilarious and deviant. She’s kind of always doing something embarrassing. And I really want to talk about the radical act of not only having a character like that, but the radical act of showing that you can have kind of a dysfunctional relationship with your mother, but still really love her.
PAMELA ADLON: My mother, she’s 88 now, she still lives next door to me, and she could drive me coo coo. But every day she says something that’s so lucid and cuts through and I’m like, wow, all of that. Like the fact that my mother came from England to America, married a Jewish man, converted, had a back alley abortion in the 50s in New York City on a dining table. What’s not to be inspired by? And then when I think about her mother, and how all of like so many of my grandmother’s paintings, her name Phyllis. Phyllis Lease. My mother named the character Phil for her mom.
CATY BORUM: Oh wow. And that’s funny.
PAMELA ADLON: Oh yeah. So she started painting when she was 50. Caty, my grandmother. And all of this stuff is dawning on me while I’m making the show.
CLIP – BETTER THINGS:
Yoo Hoo, Hello Darling.
No no no no no no.
Hi.
don’t come over here. Don’t come over here. Have a good day. Mom.
What are you doing?
I gotta go.
What are you doing?
I just got back from working in Canada.
Canada? You know, it’s legal to be a prostitute there. Fascinating, isn’t it? If you’re not a child. It’s illegal to pay for prostitutes. But it’s legal to be one.
Oh, good.
PAMELA ADLON: You know, I have three daughters. They all feel like they’re in a different generation, even though they’re within three years of each other. And then it’s me. And then it’s Nana. My mom. Marina. It’s profound. It’s like the Reservoir Dogs picture gets bigger. And you know, and then you have like these women who are… You know, the thing about. You know, I love what you said like menopause is having an it girl moment. That’s hilarious by the way Caty.
CATY BORUM: Thank you so much.
PAMELA ADLON: Also, I despise this term, “badass woman.” I really don’t like it. Because what woman isn’t? I mean,
CATY BORUM: It’s just redundant.
PAMELA ADLON: It’s redundant. It’s like saying, you know, “ATM machine.” You don’t need to say “machine.” You don’t say “6 a.m. in the morning.” You don’t say “badass woman.” It’s a woman. I don’t mind “boss ass bitch.” “Boss ass bitch” is better.
CATY BORUM: I mean, picking up on the boss ass bitch vibe, the fact that you directed the show and you had so many women making the show. And I think for listeners who maybe don’t know that having two first ADs who are women is in itself revolutionary and shouldn’t be necessarily.
PAMELA ADLON: Oh, yeah, and I was looking for a female key grip. I needed it badly.
CATY BORUM: Yeah, I actually know one. And I know that’s hard to do also. But I mean, how important is it for that story to be constructed on every level, down to the crew by women? How important and how obvious is that? Right?
PAMELA ADLON: Thank you. You know, I, there’s a term they’re using now which I really like in fashion design, “circular.” And it’s like you don’t just do it in the show, you make the set inclusive and safe. You find the people that want to work and are deserving to be part of this. You know, I just, I like people to have an example. And so that kind of thing to me is exciting. It’s about the people. You know, my crew is my family. I had crew working on the show that went all the way back to the pilot. And I took them all to Canada, and then we went to the U.K. It’s just like this is a particular thing that you need to really nurture. And what you get back is incredible when you take care of your crew because you’re shooting a scene, and then my Focus Puller will come over and say, “Oh my God, you don’t even understand. This is something that happened with me and my mom,” just like everybody would just come in and try to look, and it just felt so damn good.
CATY BORUM: Yeah. And informed by so many women’s voices and a few good dudes. But every decision informed by that. So I know that mentoring other women in the industry is really important to you. It comes up in a lot of your interviews. What’s the wisdom that you would pass on to women coming up who want to really direct and have the entire vision, like you have been able to do, and are still able to do?
PAMELA ADLON: Don’t wait. Don’t wait. People are always waiting. I got to wait till, you know my kid graduates high school. I’ve got to wait till this job finishes, and then I’m going to start writing. I’m going to wait. No. Don’t wait. And also write and rewrite, which is what my dad always said. You know, rewriting is writing. My dad would always say to me, “If you write one sentence a day, you’ve written something.” If you get a thought, a funny thought or something that you see something ridiculous. Write it down. Make that promise to yourself. You will not remember it later. You just won’t. Something silly and crazy happens. You’re sitting, you know, at a restaurant and you have this conversation. Oh, my God, that was so crazy. I was at a restaurant with my really good friend a couple weeks ago. She’s two years younger than me, and the guy sitting next to us goes, is that your mom? And we were dying crying. And I’m like, oh God, this is terrible. Her hair is beautiful silver hair, but it’s just like, why does this keep happening? Go home. Write down everything. Take out your phone. Dictate into your notes app. Don’t sleep on things that move you. And look up the book that somebody told you about. Get the book that somebody told you about. Go see the movie.
CATY BORUM: Of course, you’re not just a TV person, Pamela. You’re also a movie director. So I’d love to talk about the movie you directed called Babes, which premiered at South by Southwest. It’s a comedy starring the always hilarious Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau. And once again, I thought, Pamela Adlon has made the thing that I wished had existed because I have two kids and I always said, why does no one tell you how gross the whole thing is? And I think nobody wants you to know because you wouldn’t do it. But afterwards you want to tell your girlfriends, like your body is weird, like your body is goo and you’re smelly. You know the whole thing.
PAMELA ADLON: I’ve got to tell you, when I gave birth to my first daughter, I was like torn up. I can’t even tell you. And it was 24 hours. I was like, I can’t sit.
CATY BORUM: Yeah. No one tells You that.
PAMELA ADLON: And you’re giving me a person?
CATY BORUM: Yeah.
PAMELA ADLON: And it’s like somebody stuck knives in my ass and my vagina. It was horrible. They were like, here’s an inflatable donut for you to sit on. I was like, I need somebody to take care of me.
CATY BORUM: Like, also go take care of this baby. We know you haven’t done it before, but go do that.
PAMELA ADLON: And I don’t know how to do a baby.
CATY BORUM: I know.
PAMELA ADLON: And also, how do you make milk come out of these? It was a whole whole thing.
CATY BORUM: Yeah, I feel like just like Better Things, once again you’re opening this door to this secret club that women know about, but we speak about to our girlfriends, but it’s pretty important that others can see that as well.
PAMELA ADLON: It’s like not even. Some women don’t even talk to each other. I think that is the most profound experience that can change worlds and save the world, when women share with each other. And we gotta overthrow these fucking knuckleheads.
CATY BORUM: Well, that is a great. That’s a mic drop.
PAMELA ADLON: Yes!
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thanks to Pamela Adlon and Caty Borum for offering us temporary admission into their secret club, at least for this episode. To offer more insight. I’ve asked Caty to stay for a bit and chat with me about Better Things, as well as the importance of how women over 50 are represented in the media. Hey, Caty, how are you doing?
CATY BORUM: Hi, Gabe. Thanks so much for having me. I love talking about this stuff.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. You’ve been hosting this episode, so I feel like I get to be the guest star here at the end with you. Caty, you and Pamela had such a fun conversation, but also very enlightening. One one thing that really struck me as something we opened the episode with, right? The statistic that women over the age of 50 make up about 20% of the general U.S. population, but only 8% of the characters we see on screen. And I think we all know why this disparity exists. Right. You and Pamela talked about it quite a bit. But what are the consequences of this disparity for women, not just in TV, but in the real world?
CATY BORUM: If you’ll permit, I’ll take us back to the women’s movement a little bit in the 1970s as a way to answer that question briefly. Social scientists in our field, in communication, really recognized that we should study what is it that happens to us as viewers when we see the same kinds of patterns over and over and over again? And there was this idea that came around in media studies called symbolic annihilation. And I love this idea because it’s exactly what we’re talking about here. Symbolic annihilation is the idea that when you show the same patterns of behavior traits, appearances, norms, ways of talking, and ways of looking, of particular groups of people over and over again, what that does is actually tell us that those people are annihilated. What a powerful word that is. Culturally, they don’t exist with nuance.
And then a scholar named Gaye Tuchman in the late 1970s took this idea even further when she talked about the portrayal of women. And she said, you know what? It’s not just that women are only portrayed in like three ways on American television, but the problem is that actually those portrayals are serving to keep women subordinate in society. That, to me, is so powerful. So it’s never just the idea that, you know, we only see women in five different roles: mother, hot sidekick, cute date. Right? But we never see women in their full power. When we think about the idea that women over age 50 in the United States hold dominant amounts of economic power, political power, social power, the idea that we were never seeing fully empowered, divorced, badass women who are sexy and smart and nurturing and also good at their jobs. And they don’t have to pick any one of those things. That nuance is so meaningful for the thousands of women who might see themselves in a really nuanced, messy portrayal like that. And I would say that is breaking the symbolic annihilation of women in American entertainment.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: That is such a potent term. And I think it speaks to this question that folks have. Right. How influential is what we see on TV and the way we live our lives and operate and think of society.
CATY BORUM: I always get frustrated when we only talk about representation in terms of numbers. First of all, that’s a start. We do need to do that. But we really have to get much more nuanced in order to understand that. So to take Pam Adlon and Better Things as a really prime example of this. So decades ago, women could not get divorced because they would literally lose their children. They had no legal rights, they had no financial freedom. So when Pam Adlon comes along and the entire show is she is post-divorce, she is living her life. She is the wage earner and she’s not, by the way, trying to get re-coupled. She said in our interview that one of the most punk rock decisions she made was not to chase a man during the show. The reason this is so meaningful is because other depictions of women who are divorced over a certain age in American television have tended to fall on these tropes that the woman can’t survive without alimony. And by the way, we’re talking about heterosexual marriage. Let me just go ahead and name the bias here, right, of the classic portrayal. And so there’s this kind of victimhood that’s constantly part of the story. And Pam Adlon, by making this a really huge through line that is none of those things, takes this radical shift toward what is actually the reality, which is that 70% of divorces in the United States are initiated by women, and that has a lot to do with their economic power and their social power. So when we go back to the idea of representation and how, you know, looking beyond the numbers is so meaningful, she made a show about nuance and details, and I love that she says that she’s making a show about the mundanity. And I would argue that that is where the true power of representation, at least insofar as images of women are concerned. That is where the radical change can happen.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Well, Caty, thank you so much for hanging out with us a little bit longer this episode and breaking down some of the themes you talked about with Pamela. I really appreciate you bringing your insight and getting a little more of an academic angle on this. I learned some new terminology today. I’m very excited to deploy in the real world.
CATY BORUM: I love it.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: All right. Perfect. Well, thank you again, Caty. Appreciate it.
CATY BORUM: Thank you.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Today’s interviews were a journey and I will gladly follow Pamela and or Caty anywhere, anytime. Part of what makes Pamela’s comedy resonate with audiences is how deeply her own life is woven into the work. Today’s interview almost felt like a scrapbook of Pamela’s life experiences on and off set. But it’s precisely those personal anecdotes: the struggles, the growth, the relationships that offer insight into her comedy. It’s the undercurrent that propels Better Things, and all her comedy projects in a way that feels not only confessional, but daring and unapologetic. We are almost at the end of our time together and we’re not waiting on anybody’s kids. But before we go, the Peabody Awards are decided unanimously. So to close out our episode, I bring you We Disrupt this Broadcast’s Unanimous Decision where we unanimously pick the most disruptive line of the day.
PAMELA ADLON: She sits down in the chair. She’s like, I’m 65 years old and I’m having the best time of my life.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Next time on We Disrupt This Broadcast, we talk to writers Bobby Wilson and Ryan Redcorn from the two-time Peabody Award-winning series Reservation Dogs.
RYAN REDCORN: The ability to do that in the face of everything else, like is the power. You can take away the land, you can take away resources, you can take away all this stuff, but you won’t be able to take away our ability to laugh at you or laugh at each other. That is at the core of our community spirit.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We Disrupt This Broadcast is a Peabody and Center for Media and Social Impact production, hosted by me, Gabe González, with on air contributions from Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Joyelle Nicole Johnson. This show is brought to you by executive producers, Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Bethany Hall. Producer, Jordana Jason. Writers, Sasha Stewart, Jordana Jason, Bethany Hall, Jennifer Keishin-Armstrong, and myself, Gabe González. Consulting producer: Jennifer Keishin-Armstrong. Associate producer: Bella Green. Graphic designer: Olivia Klaus. Operations producer: Varsha Ramani. The marketing and communications team: Christine Drayer and Tunisia Singleton. From PRX, the team is: Terrence Bernardo, Jennie Cataldo, Morgan Church, Edwin Ochoa, and Amber Walker. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.