For the most part, everyone on the show (even Tricia) is a good person at heart doing their best, trying to communicate and making small realizations along the way. ![]() One’s enjoyment of Somebody Somewhere depends somewhat on your threshold for backseat plot – there are buried resentments and secrets, tense conversations and occasional blowups, but little external conflict or antagonism. The moment, played to convincingly high stakes by both Everett and Hiller, cements the two central romances of the series: Sam’s re-embrace of singing, and thus her more honest self, and the tender, tart, altogether winning friendship between her and Joel at an age when most adults seem to eschew making new platonic confidantes.īoth relationships are a joy to watch blossom, even if they’re not always the most exciting. The first episode’s climactic scene, as with half the episodes of the series, is a moving musical number: Sam, with Joel’s coaxing, embraces the stage for the first time in years. ![]() ![]() Sensing her potential, Joel, a gay Christian with his own complicated relationship to his hometown, invites Sam to his “choir practice” – a deceptively titled celebration of music and queerness and a haven for the town’s misfits. She is a singer at heart and the author of Everett’s own dirty songs, but afraid of the grief music will expose. Sam lumbers between her snooty sister Tricia’s (Mary Catherine Garrison) house and her parents’ farm, stuck and unsure, dressed down in oversized clothes, alone. Sam, by contrast, is a repressed, unconfident alter ego of the brash performer, a fictionalized vision of what might be, had Everett not left the “Little Apple” for the big one, or was tampered down instead of emboldened. HBO has billed Somebody Somewhere as a “coming-of-middle-age” story and that’s pretty accurate – both for Sam, reeling from the loss of the only person who seems to have understood her, and for the 49-year-old Everett, in her first leading series role after years of bit parts (perhaps most famously on Inside Amy Schumer).Įverett’s stage persona is larger than life – her operatic voice, her libido, her body and especially her boobs, with which she has been known to motorboat audience members. Quiet is not how one would describe Everett, a fixture on the New York comedy scene as a bawdy, thunderous performer of alternative cabaret (signature ribald songs include titties, what I gotta do to get that dick in my mouth? and keep it in your pants song). Sam is a void, turned inward and speaking little, a fuck-up to everyone other than a sympathetic coworker and former high school classmate, Joel (Jeff Hiller), who remembers her as a “big fucking deal” in their show choir days (hence the BFD title of the first episode, written by co-creators Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen and directed by executive producer Jay Duplass). Six months after her death, Sam works as an unenthusiastic grader of standardized tests and sleeps on Holly’s couch she still can’t bring herself to touch Holly’s bed.
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