That the TV series Somebody Somewhere exists at all, let alone has run for three seasons, is, some would say, a miracle. The first among the people to say that are the ones who made the show. Literally: “It is a miracle that this show is on television,” co-creator Hannah Bos tells me.
She and co-creator Paul Thureen had never had their own TV series greenlit before. Bridget Everett, who stars, writes, and executive produces the series, which is loosely inspired by her own life, has never had a showbiz spotlight like this before. It is a series about the quiet power of feelings and emotional growth, centered around a middle-aged woman who feels stuck in her life, set in the rural Midwest—and it airs on HBO’s prestigious Sunday night lineup, where series like House of the Dragon, Succession, Industry, and The White Lotus have recently lived. One thing is not like the others.
But the thing about miracles is that, while inexplicable and considered the work of some divine agency, they are welcome because of the tangible good and necessary healing they bring. So yes, Somebody Somewhere, which launches its final season on Sunday night, is a miracle.
“I was watching some episodes of this season over the weekend, and I was just like, God, I’m so proud of this,” Everett tells me. “I’ve never been able to say that about anything in my life.”
The series is, in a way, the reverse of the splashy concept the industry has trained viewers to expect. Suits in executive suites would typically knock over their coffee cups and short circuit their iPhones in a tizzied rush to put into production a series about an irresistible, spunky woman who moves to Manhattan in order to transform her life, accumulating a gaggle of charismatic characters to delight and support her on her sexy lil’ journey.
In Somebody Somewhere, Sam (Everett) moves to the other Manhattan—Manhattan, Kansas—following the death of one of her sisters from cancer. The tragedy and the move triggers a midlife crisis: the realization that she’s never bothered to truly, meaningfully figure out what she wants from life. She doesn’t know who she is, who her “people” are, or even what makes her happy. Her support system includes her surviving sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison), with whom she has a thorny relationship, and co-worker Joel (Jeff Hiller), a religious gay man experiencing a crisis of faith.
But the secret surprise of Somebody Somewhere is the secret surprise of life, and of people.
Whatever resonates as sad or depressing about that above description is, because that’s the reality of Sam and her circumstances. But she and the show are also explosive. Vibrant. Funny. Abundant with love, compassion, and yearning. Silly and mischievous. Incredibly ribald and sometimes so raunchy you’ll want to buy some pearls just so you can clutch them. It is a series interested in the totality of the experience of healing, of self-discovery, of living a life: everything that makes you cry, everything that makes you double over with laughter, and everything that makes you ponder how you’re going to get through to the next moment in between.
“People [who watch our show] feel emotional because we’re looking at the moments that you often don’t see in a TV show,” Thureen says. “I think it grabs people when they recognize something from their lives. They’re like, ‘That’s amazing that somebody bothered to put that in a TV show.’”
Somebody Somewhere is a critical darling, even though, as Everett concedes, “it is a tough show to get to catch fire.” Its fanbase, no matter its size, is evangelical about it, and the entertainment journalists who cover it type away about it like a public service. In 2023, it won a Peabody Award, with the organization citing its ability to discover “moments of authentic tenderness in the painful absurdities of the human condition.”
Still, it’s a show that everyone who watches—and everyone who made it—fervently believes demands more attention. Couldn’t we all use a miracle these days? As Patti LuPone, a friend and collaborator of Everett’s, recently said, “The fact that the Emmys and the Golden Globes ignore that show, but she gets a Peabody? At least somebody knows what they’re doing.”
Season 3 of the series finds the characters grappling with the reality that relationships change, asking questions about who we are when we are alone, what we can rely on, and what we need. Tricia is killing it professionally, with an events business to supplement her booming “C–t Pillow” sales. (Yes, what you’re imagining behind those hashes is correct.) Joel is moving in with his boyfriend, Brad (Tim Badgely). Sam is forced to really think about how she measures her own success and her own progress—and deal with the very real feeling of being abandoned.
There are scenes in which characters get to, in unexpected moments, take the time to really tell each other how great they think they are, and how important their relationship and its growth has been. My reaction to watching these scenes, a cry that resembled that of a bleating goat, may have had my neighbors wondering when they had moved next to a farm. There are scenes that are so disgustingly, crassly funny that I choked because I gasped so much—the series’ frankness about the reality of people having urgent, 9-1-1, absolutely violent bowel movements lives on.
All of the main characters, and especially Sam, have major breakthroughs, hitting meaningful, no matter how small, milestones on their trajectories towards fulfillment. But the Somebody Somewhere path is the one we all follow: a curlicue spiral, a neverending corn maze that we always get lost in. It’s another way in which the series bucks the television experience we’re conditioned to have. Just because a character wants something and goes after it doesn’t mean that achieving it will be easy, or even happen at all.
“I feel like that’s very much in life,” Bos says. “That’s how things go. I feel like in this world, you can take a risk and you’re still scared. You can take a risk and you back out of things. What’s so fun about the Somebody Somewhere world is that it’s a slow growth, and it’s also a messy growth.”
“In my experience, whenever I’ve tried to really put myself out there, it’s just been an absolute face plant,” Everett says. “It’s just like, why did I try this? Sam is the kind of person who holds on so tightly to her own fears and frustrations.” It takes a lot more than a gentle push to get her to put herself out there, be vulnerable to something that could turn out great, but could also…not.
Prior to her tenure as a HBO leading lady on a show that doubles as its audience’s weekly therapy session, Everett made a name for herself in the New York cabaret scene, where she and her band, the Tender Moments, have created a sort of Church of the Inhibitionless with their shows. That applies to both feelings and naughtiness. When I first saw them perform at Joe’s Pub years ago, I nearly wept, absolutely hypnotized as Everett told stories from her life. Moments later, she had left the stage, wandered to my table, and shoved my face into her bosom while singing her song “T–ties.”
The grounded soulfulness exhibited in Somebody Somewhere from that Bridget Everett surprised people, especially those who abide by the practice of putting people and their talents in one box. But that’s something the show itself also upends.
“When we first started doing the show, I was like, God, I hope my cabaret audience follows me. We need all the viewers we can get,” Everett says. “But they know me as, like, singing ‘T–ties’ and “What I Gotta Do to Get That D— in my Mouth?’ Are they gonna want to see the side of me? But they did, and I think that just goes to show you that, and should go to show me as a person, that you’re interesting for a whole lot of reasons, and not just what you present to the world.”
The beautiful thing about Somebody Somewhere is that it doesn’t only apply that lesson to its main character. In layered, subtle ways, it’s what every relationship in the series is about.
“Your family tends to keep you in the box that you were in when you were living together as a family,” Garrison says. “So when you grow older, they don’t change their view of you. You tend to slide back into these old dynamics when you’re together. And I think Sam and Tricia do a lot of that. They view each other in the same way that they were when they were younger versions of themselves. This season they finally see each other as they are.”
“I think the whole thing is a big love letter about friendship,” Badgely says, referring to Sam and Joel’s relationship throughout the series. “We don’t ever see shows about that. Usually it’s about romanticized love. To me, this is just a beautiful kind of study of just loving somebody in your life and how you can lift them up.”
Emotions, as you might surmise, aren’t so much surface level among the cast and crew of Somebody Somewhere as they are bursting out of their pores like geysers in Yosemite National Park. You can imagine, then, what the act of saying goodbye in a final season must have been like. (Even if, as everyone told me, they think of the show ending in a place where there is no true goodbye. “These characters are going to continue on,” Hiller says.)
Garrison remembers that when it came time to wrap Everett after her final take on set, everyone involved in the show gathered to give her a raucous ovation—clapping, hooting, and hollering that went on for 20 minutes.
“We’re a family. These are people who cry behind the camera and laugh behind the camera when we’re shooting,” Everett says. Because of COVID protocols, Season 3 was the first time the show was able to have a proper wrap party, which they had in Chicago. “I remember just looking at everybody on the bus and I said, ‘I am happy. This is what happy feels like.’ I never said that in my life like that. I just felt, honest to God, happy.”
In its own way, it was a miracle.
