Adlon and her onscreen daughters Mikey Madison, Hannah Riley and Olivia Edward premiered the show’s final season in L.A. on Wednesday.

After five seasons, Pamela Adlon’s Better Things is coming to a close, but not without some celebration first.

The semiautobiographical series in which Adlon stars, writes, directs and exec produces kicked off its final season Wednesday night with a premiere at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where she discussed how she wanted to finish off her FX series.

“I always kind of have endings in my head,” Adlon told The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet. “I wanted to be very careful about how I wove the stories together and really honor all of the characters and the kids and then all of the village, all of their friends. And so that was a huge thing, I kept going back and saying ‘Qhat do we have for [onscreen daughter] Duke [played by Olivia Edward]?’ I want Duke to have a win.”

The final season sees Adlon’s Sam Fox, a working actor and single mother, beginning to focus on herself as she navigates her three daughters coming of age and her mother (played by Celia Imrie) showing increasing signs of aging.

The series wrapped in England with Adlon’s scenes opposite Imrie, “and I feel like it was hitting different people at different times, and for me, I was like, ‘Just stay alive! Fucking keep your head down, survive.’

“I just wanted to keep everybody healthy and safe and I just needed to get to Ceila, that was the number one thing for me. Get to Ceila, make the stories complete,” Adlon remembered.

The show’s end has been particularly impactful for its young stars, who have grown up on the series while playing Adlon’s daughters.

The final days on set were “really bittersweet, and it was almost like a ticking clock of something that was obviously going to have to come to an end,” said Edward, who plays the youngest daughter. “It’s been half of my life and I’ve always looked at it as living two lives at once, taking experience and lessons from both of them.”

Added Hannah Riley, who plays middle daughter Frankie, “It’s so crazy to be like, ‘Oh this is the end.’ These are my second family, so to do five seasons with them and then stop — this has been my primary gig since I was 12, so it’s going to be weird to navigate out of that.”

Mikey Madison says that she feels very happy and proud of where her character, the oldest daughter Max, ends up. Though she made it through shooting without shedding too many tears, it’s hit her in recent weeks, she noted. “I saw Pamela doing ADR and it was the last ADR session and I was like, ‘fuck!’ I couldn’t help myself and I burst into tears and I think that was when it all culminated. I started the show when I was 15, so it’s been a crazy journey.”

As for how Adlon wants the show to be remembered, she hopes it’s a project “people go back to and something that is evergreen was really, really important to me. I didn’t want it to be timestamped by anything. I wanted it to be this go-to that people could go pull out an episode and say, ‘I want to feel this,’ or, ‘I want to feel that.’ It’s like a mood board.”

Better Things‘ final season premieres Feb. 28 on FX.

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