Pamela Adlon’s Sam Fox has an intriguing relationship with sex. She wants it and enjoys it, but on her terms and her schedule. If she’s going to engage in the messiness of sleeping with someone, it had better be worth it.

During the second season of FX’s “Better Things,” we never actually witness Sam enjoying sex. She does seek it out, but the assignation happens offscreen. In its place is a much more revealing version of release that makes her double over, huffing and puffing in what appears to be ecstatic bliss. It’s called brash honesty, and we see her take joy in it every time she shoots down a man who wants to be rewarded for his own mediocrity.

She emasculates such a suitor crumb by crumb, starting at the beginning of their evening together when she admits she only has sex with him to “get it out of the way.” At the end of the night, she lights into him so enthusiastically that it makes onlookers applaud. “I’ve hated you since the first minute of our first date. And I’ve been dating you for three weeks. That is how nice I am!”

Another leads to her pounding the ceiling of the vehicle she sits in, accompanied by full-throated howls of “Woo!” and, “Yes!” Each culminates with Sam calling out these misguided Lotharios in lengthy, ruthless monologues that end with summaries as simple as, “You are a bummer. BOO on YOU,” followed by semi-orgasmic heaving breathing.

“Better Things,” returning Thursday at 10 p.m., isn’t expressly about Sam’s love life or Sam’s challenges raising her daughters, caring for her mother, leaning on friends or dealing with her unreliable ex-husband. The new season grants a glimpse of each of these scenes from Sam’s existence in no particular order and in a way that continues to reveal new possibilities for what can be achieved within 30 minutes of storytelling.

It’s in the title: “Better Things.” This is what Sam expects out of the smallest interactions, because those blend together to become her life. If there’s a guiding philosophy to the show’s second season, it’s that everyone should be just as discerning about everything. Simply being nice doesn’t cut it, and Sam refuses to settle for “sensitive” or “decent.”

She adores her friends but has no problem turning tail and walking out on them if she senses she’ll have to make an extra effort to appease the people around them. Sam fiercely loves her kids but walks away from their demands when she needs to.

Adlon and Louis C.K. wrote or co-wrote every episode of the second season of “Better Things,” continuing a collaboration that began on C.K.’s series “Louie.” And no, we don’t have a clue as to when or if that show will be back. But we have this one, and frankly, “Better Things” is amply satisfying.  The loose cinéma vérité style “Better Things” shares with “Louie” inevitably results in comparisons between the two series, but Adlon’s sculpting of the latest batch of half-hours allows the story to confidently relax into its own identity, revealing it to be a solid extension of its creator. And Adlon knows it.

“I’m so in love with what I have and all the pieces that we’re putting together,” Adlon told Salon in an interview conducted recently in Los Angeles. “ . . . It was really hard. And it just feels so f–king good. It feels really good.”

The sophomore run of “Better Things” builds upon the first season’s feelings-driven narrative style by giving the characters weightier scenarios while still enabling them to confront them with a sense of warmth and lightness.