Farewell to ‘Somebody Somewhere,’ TV’s Rare Love Letter to Middle America

In the opening scene of the third season of Somebody Somewhere, Bridget Everett’s character, Sam Miller, crouches on the floor of a bar, talking baby-talk to a dog. When she gets up she shows a patron a picture of a dog she’s dreaming about adopting. Then, she leaves, singing in her truck down a Kansas dirt road, heading into town to celebrate her sister’s divorce with margaritas and queso.

The moments of this show are not seismic. There are no big boardroom deals. No tantruming megarich eldest boys playing with election outcomes. No inbred heir mowed down by dragonfire. No stupidly hot rabbis. Absolutely zero murders or hate crimes.

And yet, the series, woven together by the small moments of everyday normal life — Corningware mugs, fights over loading the dishwasher, casseroles, too much pinot grigio, and awkward dates — has a heart more expansive and beautiful than the fields of Kansas and a storyline more compelling than any show on television.

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The first two seasons of Somebody Somewhere depicted Sam lost in her grief over the death of one of her sisters, grappling with her mother’s alcoholism, and facing her older sister Trish’s constant judgment. Thrown back into her hometown of Manhattan, Kansas, after a failed attempt at a singing career, Sam finds a community of delightful weirdos at an underground cabaret held at a church. The friends form a family of misfits on the prairie played by Murray Hill, Jeff Hiller, and the delightful Mary Catherine Garrison, who plays Sam’s sister Trish.

But if the first two seasons were about finding community in a mid-sized, middling town, in the middle of a state that people are more apt to leave than move to, the third season is about what it means to stay in that community when people pair off, and life changes and evolves. Sam watches her friends couple up and feels the loneliness of being the third wheel. Jeff Hiller’s irrepressibly delightful character Joel finds the love of his life but struggles with giving up the dream of being a father. Murray Hill’s ebullient Fred Rococo, whose love- and life-affirming wedding capped off Season Two, now deals with the realities of marriage to a person who is accepting and loving and also, frankly, kind of controlling and a bit annoying.
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The character with the best arc is Trish, who began the show as nitpicky and judgmental with a Karen bob and a “Live, Laugh, Love” aesthetic. This season, through refills of a very large and very pink Stanley, she softens as she deals with divorce, grows her cunty pillow business, manages a bout with chlamydia, stands up for her sister when she thinks she’s being ghosted, drinks too much pinot grigio and joins the country club. All the while, as she is manifesting and living and laughing and loving, she’s connecting with her sister and the group of Midwestern gays.

It would be so easy to make Trish a villain. To make the storylines of this show hinge on queer trauma or the pain of red-state politics. But nothing is so simple. Everything is just beautifully, heartachingly normal, hard, mean, and happy, all at once. 

I live in a place that is a lot like Manhattan, Kansas. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to be specific. In fact, most people in America do live in these middle places, clustered into small towns, mid-sized cities. And most of the LGBTQ population lives here too. According to the Williams Institute, 63 percent of the LGBTQ population lives in the Midwest, mountain and Southern regions of the country. 

Maybe people come here because, like Sam, they’re returning home. But most of us live here because we love it. We love these complicated, beautiful church basements, overstuffed home-goods boutiques, our problematic Trishes and our delightful Joels, and our homes full of the ghosts of our past that we cannot escape, because we don’t want to. Instead, we sit down, invite them to Thanksgiving, and figure out a messy way of existing together.

Even though we are the majority of Americans, we don’t often see ourselves on television. And if we do, we are often the butt of the jokes, the object of condescension.

But in this show, Bridget Everett offers us another, kinder way of seeing not just the mid-parts of America, but the everyday beauty of all of our lives — our search for faith, love, and hope, Stanley cups, SUVs, and dive bars strung up in Christmas lights.

In this show, the gentle gaze of the camera shows a split-level house not as an object of aesthetic scorn, but as a thing of beauty. The Band-Aid-beige walls of a house with dated oak cabinets are not evidence of a place in need of a makeover, but a backdrop of friendship and true joy.

The loneliness epidemic headlines often focus on men, but the data reveals the reality that we are all lonely. We are all looking for somebody somewhere. We all want love and community. And political divides, the isolation of the algorithm, make that so hard. But, in one of the show’s more tender moment’s Joel tells Sam that she is his person. They are friends, but they are also soul mates. 

Spoiler: Sam does get a date. Joel is working it out with his boyfriend. But like some Sex in the Mid-Sized Midwestern City with a lot of flannel and comfy pants, in this show, it’s the friendships that sustain them.
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In the season’s final episode, Sam sings the Miley Cyrus song “The Climb” to her friends in her bar. She’s not celebrating any particular moment of triumph except just that: the friendship, the community, the everyday connections that create the backdrop of the awkward, sweaty, un-Instagrammable parts of our lives. It’s affecting and beautiful and — not to be corny as hell, but — the most important kind of story you can tell.

Somebody Somewhere is a spot of gentleness in a world that’s very hard. A show about connection in a world that seems depleted of it.