THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020 81
THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2020 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
VOLUME XCVI, NO. 9, April 20, 2020. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028792X) is published weekly (except for four combined issues: February 17 & 24, June 8 & 15, July 6 & 13, and
August 3 & 10) by Condé Nast, a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Eric Gillin, chief business
officer; Piper Goodspeed, head of brand revenue strategy; James Guilfoyle, executive director of finance and business operations; Fabio B. Bertoni, general counsel. Condé Nast Global: Roger Lynch,
chief executive officer; Wolfgang Blau, chief operating officer and president, international; Pamela Drucker Mann, global chief revenue officer and president, U.S. revenue; Anna Wintour, U.S. artis-
tic director and global content advisor; Mike Goss, chief financial officer; Samantha Morgan, chief of staff. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canadian Goods
and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001.
POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO THE NEW YORKER, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE
INQUIRIES: Write to The New Yorker, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037, call (800) 825-2510, or e-mail [email protected]. Give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. Subscribers:
If the Post Office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year. If during your subscription term or up to one year after the
magazine becomes undeliverable, you are dissatisfied with your subscription, you may receive a full refund on all unmailed issues. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within four weeks after receipt of
order. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to The New Yorker, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For advertising inquiries, e-mail [email protected]. For submission
guidelines, visit http://www.newyorker.com. For cover reprints, call (800) 897-8666, or e-mail [email protected]. For permissions and reprint requests, call (212) 630-5656, or e-mail [email protected].
No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The New Yorker. The New Yorker’s name and logo, and the various titles and headings herein, are trademarks of Advance Magazine Publishers
Inc. To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines, visit http://www.condenast.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services that we believe would
interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these offers and/or information, advise us at P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037, or call (800) 825-2510.
THE NEW YORKER IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS,
UNSOLICITED ART WORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED
MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, ART WORK, OR OTHER MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND ORIGINALS, UNLESS
SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY THE NEW YORKER IN WRITING.
complains that she looks fat. She’s learn-
ing to play the game of female self-dep-
recation, but her friend immediately re-
coils: “If you’re fat, then what the fuck
am I?” Duke is horrified; while it’s true
that the other girl is plump, we can tell
that Duke has never before thought of
her that way. “You’re perfect,” she says,
with genuine awe. The friend takes an-
other look at herself in the mirror, her
nose striped with contouring makeup,
and proudly declares, “I know.” That
kind of wry sincerity is a distinguish-
ing feature of “Better Things.” In a long,
cozy sequence in the season’s first epi-
sode, Sam cooks breakfast for her sleep-
ing household, sizzling sausage and fry-
ing eggs in a private ritual that’s best
appreciated before her daughters rise
and unloose chaos. The scene doesn’t
advance plot or develop character. But,
as they say of home cooking, it’s made
with love.A
t least one consolation awaits us
on the other side of the pandemic:
Larry David will have hay to make from
the concept of social distancing. He’s
already begun to say his piece—in a
widely circulated P.S.A. sponsored by
the State of California, David, relaxing
at home in an easy chair, scolds “the id-
iots out there” who insist on going out
when they should be staying in. “Go
home. Watch TV. That’s my advice to
you,” he says, and you should take him
up on it, starting with the latest season
of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” its tenth.
The show has been on the air intermit-
tently since 2000: that’s a mind-bog-
gling twenty years of Larry, Cheryl, Susie,
Jeff, and the rest of the crew. (Leon Black,
Larry’s indispensable sidekick, playedby J. B. Smoove, came on several years
later. Sadly, the great Bob Einstein, who
played Larry’s friend Marty Funkhouser,
died last year; the show insists that the
Funk Man is on a trip to China.) The
sheer fact of “Curb”’s longevity gives it
an aspect of performance art. There’s
something fascinating and disarmingly
human about seeing the actors’ faces age
in real time. They all look markedly
older this go-round—though, thank-
fully, they’re as emotionally stunted as
they ever were.
Fan as I am of Larry David, I’ve oc-
casionally wondered whether he should
call it a day. Season 9, with a silly plot
about fatwas that seemed at least a de-
cade out of date, fell wide of the mark.
But Season 10 is a return to top form.
Larry, looking at Trump’s America from
inside his liberal Los Angeles bubble,
does what he does best and makes ev-
erything about him. There’s a gag in
which he discovers that wearing a
maga hat gets him out of obligations
with people he wants to avoid, which
is to say, everyone. More riskily, he dips
a toe into the waters of #MeToo, in a
plot that involves Larry’s assistant, Alice
(Megan Ferguson), mistaking his usual
socially unacceptable boundary-crossing
behavior for a sexual advance. (In a gift
from the comedic gods, Jeff Garlin, who
plays Larry’s best friend and manager,
happens to look uncannily like Harvey
Weinstein.) My favorite episode might
be one that has no particular comment
to make about our cursed political pres-
ent, but loses itself in the pleasures of
competitive tipping and the sound of
the Spanish lisp. It’s petty, ridiculous,
and pretty, pretty, pretty good—in other
words, just right. an asshole, and your other sister’s great. ”
The tension melts, and mother and
daughter collapse laughing. It’s funny
because it’s true.
“Better Things” shines in part be-
cause of its casting; the three young ac-
tresses have made themselves at home
in Adlon’s world, enriching it with the
instinctive, intimate gestures of real life.
But its success depends on Adlon, whose
personality is the medium through which
everything else is filtered. On “Louie,”
the FX show, created by Louis C.K.,
that launched a thousand quirky, navel-
gazing imitators, she played Pamela, an
aggressively distilled version of herself:
a hilarious hard-ass with a voice like a
3 a.m. cigarette and a low tolerance for
the idiotic antics of weak men, which
was exactly what made her irresistible
to them. Her Sam Fox alter ego, at once
wiser and more vulnerable, relent-
lessly capable and still somehow unable
to keep herself from royally screwing up,
is a far fuller creation. She’s a woman’s
woman, not a man’s fantasy of one.
Along with Phoebe Waller-Bridge,
Sharon Horgan, and others, Adlon is
part of a growing cohort of female TV-
makers who are interested in showing
us what it’s like to live in a body: to be
turned on or to gain weight, to have hot
flashes or to need—while trapped in
traffic in a friend’s car—suddenly, ur-
gently, to pee. (Luckily, the friend has
young children; Sam straps on a diaper
and lets loose.) We get a terrific slap-
stick bit in which Sam tackles her re-
calcitrant mother to the ground to cap-
ture her saliva for a DNA test, and a
sweet view of Duke and a friend disfigur-
ing their faces with Instagram-style
makeup. Duke, skinny as a toothpick,