We live in a time when there is so much TV available to stream that you could spend the rest of your life scrolling past viable options and never actually engage. There are reboots and remakes and IP creations and prestige shows and famous actors making so much noise, driving you to commit to something and finally click play (or however remotes work now).
One of the consequences of this, besides the industry probably collapsing one day, is that smaller, quieter shows can sometimes get lost in the avalanche (Lost in the Avalanche sounds like an upcoming Lost spin-off). That’s why I am here, a great hero (woman who watches a lot of TV) representing the underdogs (underwatched television) to make sure that everyone knows about the lovely Somebody Somewhere. The third and final season has just begun, with new episodes dropping weekly.
The show is loosely autobiographical, based on the life of the comedian and cabaret performer Bridget Everett, who plays Sam, a talented singer who is back in her tiny Kansas home town after caring for her terminally ill sister. We join her when she is full of grief, uncertainty and loneliness. We also join just as she hits it off with Joel, a sweet gay man who runs an underground event called Choir Practice. Choir Practice is a performance group where all the queers and weirdos in the town hang out, emceed by the charming Fred Rococo (the NY performer Murray Hill). Sam’s family members feature heavily in the show but it is this friendship with Joel, and the community she discovers, that becomes the heart.
There are a lot of sad, poignant, hard things that happen in Somebody Somewhere. There is also a steady stream of hilarious moments each episode. It’s what you would probably categorise as a dramedy if you were forced to at gunpoint in some kind of bizarre hostage situation.
One of the things I love most about Somebody Somewhere is that it’s a rare example of a show that is centred around people in their 40s. Not only that, but it’s centred around people in their 40s who don’t have huge shiny lives all completely figured out yet. The spine of the show is simply an adult friendship that develops between a cynical, sad heterosexual woman unsatisfied with life, and a gangly, giggly, wholesome, gay, religious man who is trying to inhabit the life he desires. But in that simplicity is where the big, complex things lie.
It’s a show about trying to find your pocket of belonging, no matter how small your world is. It’s about family, chosen family and the grief of losing people in different ways – but it’s also about the grief of seemingly wasted potential, for those who didn’t get to become who they wanted, or watched their loved ones fall short, sometimes because of circumstance, sometimes because of themselves. It manages to be about so many things, while still feeling understated and totally authentic. And most importantly, it’s very funny.
A large part of this is down to the performances. In real life, Everett is a loud, larger-than-life personality, famous for her raunchy cabaret performances. In the show, Sam is quieter, and heartbreakingly vulnerable and unconfident, but she has a charming and magnetic quality that is always there, though she only seems to feel it in herself when she is onstage.
Sam and Joel have one of my favourite on-screen friendships, full of something that I love to see represented: they try to make each other laugh, and they succeed. The friendship feels completely real.
The cast is made up of brilliant actors who aren’t all perfect-looking models with teeth shiny enough to scare the cows. Sam is a strong fat woman who is comfortable in her body and eats food on camera in a normal way – not the usual TV way, where it’s a joke to remind you she’s fat.
She wears comfortable clothes, rips open her shirt on stage to show off her big boobs, and has sex with men who are into her because she’s funny and hot. In the show, her being a fat woman, Joel being a skinny, tall, gangly, glasses-wearing man and their friend Fred being a short trans man doesn’t prevent any of them from being desired and loved, and finding their place, as is right and true.
It’s true that Somebody Somewhere is packed to the brim with feeling, with poignancy, with quietly sad moments that make your eyes fill with tears (as Everett can get hers to do so well).
But the reason it’s so good, and the reason I am here telling you about it, is because it’s also just frigging delightful. It can be heartbreaking and emotional but it never feels like hard work, it just feels like you care about these people being depicted in a special way on your screen. It is infused with so much humour, so many funny lines, so much care and thought, that it never feels like a dark cloud. It’s not a show with huge global stakes such as Succession, or huge sprawl like Game of Thrones, or vibrating anxiety like The Bear.
It is about smaller, but no less important things. It is about the lives of Sam and Joel and the gang – my friends.
Rebecca Shaw is a writer based in Sydney
