A Somebody Somewhere Spectacle
The final scenes of Somebody Somewhere feature no hidden messages, no big reveals, no closing resolutions or discoveries or choices. The enormous radical shift is simply that Sam is happy now. Or at least she’s happier than she’s been before. Sam, who is played by series producer and writer Bridget Everett, has a job at a bar, which she does not like but which will do for now. She’s volunteering at the animal shelter, and maybe someday soon she’ll adopt a dog. She has the hope of a romantic relationship — there’s no grandiose declaration of love but one short, sweet embrace with Iceland, the man who’s renting her family farm. She’s surrounded by her friends and her sister, who have all shown up to spend time with her at the bar on a Sunday afternoon. The joy of it isn’t even that they all showed up; it’s that she asked them to be there at all. The big closing scene is Sam belting “The Climb,” a song about celebrating journeys rather than destinations.
It’s an episode made almost entirely of one-on-one conversations. Almost nothing happens, and it is why Somebody Somewhere is the best show on television this year and one of the great TV shows of this era. It does everything exactly wrong, according to the current rules of TV. Most recent series must justify their existence with size — the size of the stars, the IP, the budget, the showrunner’s reputation, the connected fictional universe, the stakes. Somebody Somewhere is tiny: a gorgeous, introspective, intimate story about a woman with devastatingly mundane problems whose chief obstacle is her own aching sense of grief and dislocation. Most TV has become relentlessly plot-driven, furiously scouring out any scene that doesn’t move the story forward, and even within a network sitcom’s circling status quo structure, the most successful new comedies of the past several years have a big will-they, won’t-they, a spinoff tie-in, or a hooky premise that promises tension and surprise. Not Somebody Somewhere. Its victories and complications remain modest developments, puny by typical TV standards and monumental on the scale of everyday life (a divorce, a storm, a tough conversation, a death).
On the surface, Somebody Somewhere appears to be a fish-out-of-water show, a classic story about someone drifting through a new place, rootless and ill at ease. In the premiere, Sam is working a job she hates in her hometown she’s pretty sure she hates, stuck here after the ailing sister she returned to care for died of cancer. As the series builds, its major developments match the standard adjustment-to-a-new-place narrative beats: Sam meets Joel (Jeff Hiller) and Fred (Murray Hill), and these new friends introduce her to a group of queer performers who help her refind her singing voice. She grows closer to her sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison) despite their familial hang-ups and duties to their aging parents. Sam finds new rituals and routines that give her life shape. These themes will seem familiar to fans of shows like Schitt’s Creek: acceptance, self-love, the peculiarities of a small town, feeling seen, finding community. In fact, Somebody Somewhere reads like a less formulaic, less sentimental, more grounded, and much sadder version of Schitt’s Creek; you can pitch it to your friends and family as “Schitt’s Creek for people who could not stand Schitt’s Creek” and be relatively accurate.
But any description of the show in the abstract fails to appreciate the marvel of Bridget Everett. She has never been a recognizable screen performer, and her presence is refreshing compared to the omnipresent veneers-and-shiny-hair movie stars. As Sam, Everett is not showy or overtly impressive; she has a lucidity that clearly displays her immense unhappiness and loneliness, and she conveys emotions that are much harder to translate onscreen. She feels shame for being unable to dig herself out of this hole. She’s shy. She feels anger toward her family, and toward this town, and toward herself, but her anger rarely manifests in big screen-friendly outbursts or monologues. Instead, Everett’s work on the series is marked by stillness. Sam sits on benches and in her car, she stands and leans on a kitchen counter, and she commits, once again, to going through the motions even though she hates them.
By season three, the life-altering changes for Sam have stayed remarkably small. Even compared with a show like Reservation Dogs, which drew intense emotional catharsis out of intimate moments, Somebody Somewhere remained restrained, precisely because Sam doesn’t have the deep communal connections that would allow her sister’s death to resonate throughout the story as broadly. Too often, Sam cannot find the release she desires. She loves her sister but feels pressure to keep her shit together so she doesn’t tank Tricia’s burgeoning career or precarious family life. She loves Joel, in a way that she likely has never loved anyone else, but especially as Joel gets closer to his new boyfriend, Brad (Tim Bagley), Sam has to moderate her reliance on him so she doesn’t disrupt their romantic intimacy. Sam still finds it so hard to stand in front of a crowd and sing, which is the one thing that used to bring her joy and make her feel at ease in her own body. Somebody Somewhere often feels small and restrained because Sam has so few places she feels safe to be messily, unreservedly loud.
If Somebody Somewhere really were a fish-out-of-water series, the show would have been much more comfortable to watch. The awkwardness and grief are so much more complicated than if Sam had just moved to a new town. We know what to do with that story. We understand the externalized experience of difference and dislocation because it’s an inner disorientation that’s reflected in an outer reality. It would be simpler — an easier pill to swallow. But Sam is at home, and she still feels out of place. It’s something much harder to bear: a show about a fish that is living in the same pond it’s always lived in — and still doesn’t feel at home.
It’s also why the series finale feels so transcendent despite its relatively low-stakes ending. In the end, Sam’s accomplishments are straightforward and pragmatic. Somebody Somewhere’s long stretch of restraint, of suppressed feelings, of Sam trying so hard to contain herself so that she can fit in finally bursts through the seams. She stands in front of her closest friends and belts “The Climb,” on full display and at the center of attention for one of the few times in the whole series. Somebody Somewhere ends with an acknowledgment that life will always be hard and this place may never feel fully like a home, but Sam can survive and be happy here, and that’s more than enough.