God Bless Somebody Somewhere

Representation matters, including for chubby, misunderstood farmtown kids

This is the energy I want to bring to my everyday life. (SOURCE: Youtube screenshot.)

Growing up, I resented Friends and Seinfeld and pretty much every show set in New York. I resented Perfect Strangers and shows set in Chicago. And Full House and the fact that it was in San Francisco.

I also loved these shows, of course. I consider George Costanza a kindred spirit. To this day, I can do Balki Bartokomous’s Dance of Joy.¹

But watching every one required a constant filtering, a mental rejiggering as I watched jokes about traffic and subways and bustling offices and desperate apartment searches.

I wasn’t an idiot or anything – I knew traffic and subways existed…but they didn’t exist for anyone I knew.

Sitting in the living room of our farmplace, watching maybe the 12th car of the day go down the road, hearing the hog feeder lids bang across the yard, I wondered why shows weren’t set in rural Iowa, or rural anywhere.

The closest show I could come up with was Coach – a college football coach in what seemed to be northern Minnesota? Sure, okay, vaguely close. Kind of. At least they understood the cold.

And then, when I was 40, I watched Somebody Somewhere, and I thought:

Finally.

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First things first: Somebody Somewhere isn’t exactly “rural.”

It’s set in Manhattan, Kansas, after all – which a quick Google tells me has a burgeoning 50,000 people and a state university. I’m only slightly joking when I say that’s a metropolis.

I, meanwhile, grew up on a farm, near a town called Titonka (population 487 at latest count). There are no stoplights. There’s not even a school anymore. There are, however, multiple churches, a bar, and a tree – the three ingredients that make a town, as my friends and I agreed in high school.

Anyway. The premise of Somebody Somewhere is that Sam, played by Bridget Everett (also the show’s creator), moves to her hometown of Manhattan to care for her dying sister, and after her sister’s death, sticks around and reintegrates herself into her hometown.

She makes a new best friend — a coworker named Joel, who becomes a soulmate of sorts. She makes peace with her other, estranged sister. She deals with her aging parents, makes more friends.

That’s it. There is no grand heroic arc about Somebody Somewhere. This is not Carmy returning to a humble sandwich shop and whipping a ragtag crew of workers into shape to win Great Restaurateur Michelin glory (I mean, I assume – I quit The Bear in season 3).

It’s about the humble, humbling stuff of making friends and dealing with difficult people and trying to become better.

And now I realize I’m making this show sound like a bummer – it’s also not. It’s about a bawdy woman being silly and gross with her best friend, making jokes about her boobs, doing over-the-top karaoke, laughing with her sister about STIs. It’s about people being as disgusting and weird and giggly as the rest of us – which is to say, it’s a JOY.

But the rural-adjacent setting is what makes this show work, and to me, what makes the show important. To me, it’s a show about living around each other. Not around as in near, but around as in, around – as in, you’re in a small place, and there’s no choice but to sidle around each other sometimes, learn to deal with each other, figure shit out.

What’s beautiful about that is that it allows all the characters to be more than their demographics.

I am a cis, white, straight-sized lady, so I am going to tread carefully here – I’ll leave it up to groups I don’t belong to to decide whether Somebody Somewhere represents them well.

But from my standpoint, Somebody Somewhere at the very least represents many groups that don’t get a lot of screentime elsewhere, and not just rural people – I’m talking queer people, fat people, churchgoing people.

That’s great in and of itself, but there’s something else the show does that’s truly remarkable: it allows those characters to be more than their demographics. Queer characters get storylines that aren’t about their queerness. Fat characters get storylines that have nothing to do with weight or “wellness.”

Those identities do come up, but organically – as when Joel, who is gay, runs into his former high school bully at men’s Bible study. It’s emotional and beautifully acted – the bully gives a heartfelt apology, and Joel goes back to his car and sobs.

(Side note: Let’s also sit with the fact that there are gay men who go to church, and it’s not a Thing. There’s no grand conflict – they are believers, and their churches accept them.)

Sam and Joel’s friend, Fred – played by drag king Murray Hill – is an ag professor at the local university. At no point that I recall does his gender identity come into play. He’s just Sam’s professor friend who has a kind of insufferable wife.

Similarly, the show allows the people of the rural Midwest to be more than rural Midwesterners.

It’s true that farms are central to the show — Fred teaches ag, Sam goes on a date that’s nothing more than a walk around her farmplace. But the show does not lean into any of this too heavily. These are not stalwart, salt-of-the-earth, quietly heroic stewards of American farmland.

Instead, these are good, if flawed, people who happen to live in farm country. No more, no less.

This is the opposite of the picture of farm people I grew up with. And it was a picture that was particularly prominent in election years.

Despite the fact that I grew up in Iowa, no one I knew caucused. My parents didn’t. My friends’ parents didn’t – or at least, not that anyone talked about. No one was really that politically active. (Well, except if you counted that one notoriously [whispers] Democrat family that everyone knew.)

But that didn’t mean the caucuses were escapable. There were constant ads, news stories every four years telling us that we were heroic, strong, unsung – that we were Real America.

Don’t get me wrong – Iowans are pretty great. But also, no one I knew lived up to those ads. The people I grew up around could be kind and stoic and hard-working…but they could also be selfish, stupid, small-minded…which is to say, just like anyone else. Just like George Costanza or Joey Tribbiani.

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One thing notably absent from Somebody Somewhere is politics. Not once, from what I recall, does MAGA or Republicanism or Democrats come up.

This is for sure unrealistic. I came to this essay ready to write about that as Somebody Somewhere’s one failing – that no one is wearing MAGA hats, that there’s no apparent town-and-gown friction.

But then, how many shows do bring in contemporary politics? Do the outies on Severance have Harris Walz bumper stickers?

That’s different, you say. Severance is sci-fi.

Maybe. But in that case, maybe you can call Somebody Somewhere fantasy. At least, in this one particular way, it is.

In the many rural areas I’ve traveled to in my reporting, politics is central to people’s lives, even their identities. Same as anywhere.

The sides of barns all over the country are painted with “TRUMP,” and the people there argue with their neighbors or grow estranged from their family members over how they voted.

BUT. It’s also true that rural people are more than their politics. Which is something I imagine the rest of the country forgets.

Farm people, churchgoers, the working poor – the main places many Americans encounter those groups in any media right now is in political news — and specifically, in stories about how far those groups have swung toward Donald Trump.

I appreciate that Bridget Everett made a show that allowed its characters to be everything but partisan. Because let’s be clear: this show is not apolitical – it is a political choice to depict queer people, for example, as full people.

But the conflicts in this show are not about the small, bitter conflict between a closet lib and their MAGA uncle. They’re about navigating whether to have kids, trying to ask out the reclusive guy at the bar, dealing with your friend’s spouse who’s low-key kind of a jerk.

I do not at all mean to say that partisan differences don’t matter – of course they do.

But I think what makes Somebody Somewhere such a balm is that it depicts life happening when it’s not crowded out by a growing miasma of political dread.

—

Anyway, don’t get me wrong – I don’t think 10-year-old me would have plonked down for a gentle show about a middle-aged lady’s friendships. I was desperate to see myself on TV, but I also … well, I was 10. I wanted to watch Bayside High and Steve Urkel.

But maybe would I have watched it? I was a chubby, lonely girl who was dying to see a fat character who was anything more than comic relief. I would have fallen over to see a TV protagonist do something so profoundly normal, like cleaning out her dad’s barn.

Which brings me to the sad part: Somebody Somewhere is over now – it wasn’t renewed for a fourth season. I think that’s why I took so long to finish this final season (and write this post): I was savoring it.

I genuinely don’t expect to see another show capture where I’m from as well as this – even if Somebody Somewhere isn’t quite about Titonka.² This show was damn near perfect, anyway. So Bridget Everett, if you ever happen to read this: thank you so much, you beautiful genius. (Also I’m convinced we’d be besties so hey let’s get a beer or 3.)

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LINKS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Do you need more Bridget Everett? YES YOU DO. Read this perfect New Yorker profile. Watch her as one of Maria Bamford’s besties on Lady Dynamite (also a PHENOMENAL show about a middle-aged Midwestern lady being a hot mess). Watch her bring down the house on Jimmy Fallon. What a gift this woman is.

Tariffs. My life is tariffs. But that’s okay because I’m great at explaining them. Go read about the “deal” (loose term) between the U.S. and U.K. Then if you want some real excitement, read about the president’s budget.

General housekeeping: ramping back up. As you gathered from my illustrious lawn-goose post, it’s been a rough time. But I’m back on the horse and doing what any self-respecting wannabe newsletter-writer does when she is on an upswing. You guessed it, I’m on my way to failing to finish the Artist’s Way once again. HOT DAMN. So anyway…the goal is more posts. Stay tuned.

YOUR INTERNET JOY: Heart sings “Stairway to Heaven.” Hat-tip to the great Samantha Irby, whose newsletter reminded me that this video exists — Stairway at the Kennedy Center with a full choir and strings? Hell yes of course. God bless these rocking ladies my GOD. (Bonus moment of joy: Jimmy Page’s *delight* when he sees the choir.)

1. There is a whole thinkpiece to be done on Perfect Strangers and My Big Fat Greek Wedding and comedy premised on Greek people’s purported inherent wackiness.

2. Hollywood take note: I WILL WRITE A BAWDY, SURREAL SITCOM ABOUT TITONKA IF YOU WANT ME TO.