Farewell to the best and most underrated TV show

This is the TV series Someone Somewhere Even existing, let alone running for three seasons, is a miracle to some. The first people to say this are the people who made the show. Literally: “It’s a miracle that this show is on TV,” says co-creator Hannah Bos.

She and co-creator Paul Thureen had never been greenlit for their own TV series before. Bridget EverettThe series' lead actress, writer and executive producer, which is loosely inspired by her own life, has never been more in the show business spotlight. It's a series about the quiet power of feelings and emotional growth, centered around a middle-aged woman who feels stuck in her life in the rural Midwest – and it airs on HBO's prestigious Sunday night lineup How House of the Dragon, Consequence, industryAnd The White Lotus I lived recently. One is not like the others.

But the thing about miracles is that while they are inexplicable and viewed as the work of a divine authority, they are welcomed because of the tangible good and necessary healing they bring. So yes, Someone Somewherewhich begins its final season on Sunday evening, is a miracle.

“I watched a few episodes of this season over the weekend and thought, '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 some ways the opposite of the splashy concept that the industry has taught viewers. Normally, suit men in executive suites would knock over their coffee cups and hotwire their iPhones in a frantic rush to get a series into production about an irresistible, courageous woman who moves to Manhattan to change her life, gathering a bevy of charismatic delights along the way and support her on her sexy little journey.

In Someone SomewhereSam (Everett) moves to the other Manhattan – Manhattan, Kansas – after one of her sisters dies of cancer. The tragedy and the move trigger a midlife crisis: the realization that she has never made the effort to truly and meaningfully figure out what she wants from life. She doesn’t know who she is, who her “people” are, or what makes her happy. Her support system includes her surviving sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison), with whom she has a delicate relationship, and her colleague Joel (Jeff Hiller), a religious gay man experiencing a crisis of faith.

But the secret surprise of Someone Somewhere is the secret surprise of life and people.

Whatever sounds sad or depressing about the above description is because that is the reality of Sam and her circumstances. But she and the show are also explosive. Lively. Funny. Full of love, compassion and longing. Silly and mischievous. Incredibly offensive and sometimes so raunchy you'll want to buy some beads just so you can hold onto them. It's a series interested in the totality of the experience of healing, self-discovery, and life: anything that makes you cry, anything that makes you double over with laughter, and anything that makes you think about how it is one goes to get through to the next moment in between.

“People (who watch our show) are emotional because we watch the moments that you often don’t see on a TV show,” Thureen says. “I think it grabs people when they recognize something from their lives. They say, 'That's amazing that someone bothered to put that on a TV show.'”

Someone Somewhere is a critical darling, even if, as Everett admits, “it's a difficult show to catch fire.” Its fan base, no matter how large, is evangelical, and the entertainment journalists who cover it write about it like a public service . In 2023 it won a Peabody Award with the citing organization his ability to find “moments of authentic tenderness in the painful absurdities of human existence.”

Still, it's a show that everyone who sees it – and everyone who made it – fervently believes needs more attention. Couldn't we all use a miracle these days? As Patti LuPonea friend and co-worker of Everett, said recently“The fact that the Emmys and the Golden Globes ignore this show but it gets a Peabody? At least someone knows what they’re doing.”

In Season 3 of the series, characters grapple with the reality that relationships change and ask questions about who we are when we're alone, what we can rely on, and what we need. Tricia is going full speed ahead professionally, with an events business to complement her booming “C–t Pillow” sales. (Yes, what you imagine behind those hashes is correct.) Joel moves in with his friend Brad (Tim Badgely). Sam is forced to really think about how she measures her own success and progress – and to confront the very real feeling of being abandoned.

There are scenes where the characters take the time in unexpected moments to really tell each other how great they think each other is and how important their relationship and its development have been. My reaction to these scenes, a cry that resembled that of a bleating goat, may have made my neighbors wonder when they moved to a farm. There are scenes so disgusting and utterly funny that I choked from gasping so hard – the show's frankness about the reality of people having urgent, 9-1-1, absolutely violent defecation is alive further.

All of the main characters, and especially Sam, have major breakthroughs and reach meaningful, no matter how small, milestones on their path to fulfillment. But that Someone Somewhere The path is the one we all follow: a squiggly spiral, a never-ending corn maze in which we always get lost. In this way, too, the series defies the television experience we are used to. Just because a character wants something and strives for it doesn't mean it will be easy to achieve it or achieve it at all.

“I feel like it’s an essential part of life,” Bos says. “That's how things work. I feel like you can take a risk in this world and still be afraid. You can take a risk and back out. What's so fun about it? Someone Somewhere The world is that it is slow growth, and it is also chaotic growth.”

“I've found that every time I've tried to really put myself out there, it's been a total showstopper,” Everett says. “It’s just like, why did I try that? 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 nudge to get her to show up and be vulnerable to something that could be great, but neither.

Before her stint as an HBO leading lady in a show that doubles as a weekly therapy session for audiences, Everett made a name for herself in the New York cabaret scene, where she and her band, the Tender Moments, created a kind of church of Inhibitionless their shows. This applies to both feelings and naughtiness. When I first saw her perform at Joe's Pub years ago, I almost cried, completely mesmerized as Everett shared stories from her life. Moments later she had left the stage, walked over to my table and held my face to her chest while singing her song “T–ties.”

The grounded soulfulness shown in Someone Somewhere out of The Bridget Everett surprised people, especially those who adhere to the practice of pigeonholing people and their talents. But that's something that also turns the show itself on its head.

“When we started doing the show I thought, God, I hope my cabaret audience follows me. We need all the viewers we can get,” Everett said. “But you know me as the singer of 'T–ties' and 'What I Gotta Do to Get That D— in my Mouth?' Will they want to see that side of me?” But they did, and I think that shows you, and should show me as a person, that you are interesting for a whole host of reasons and not just because of what you present to the world.”

The beauty of it Someone Somewhere is that it doesn't just apply this lesson to its main character. In complex and subtle ways, every relationship in the series is about this.

“Your family tends to keep you in the box you were in when you lived together as a family,” Garrison says. “So as you get older, they don’t change their view of you. When you're together, you tend to fall back into that old dynamic. And I think Sam and Tricia do a lot of that. They see each other in the same way they did when they were younger versions of themselves. This season they finally see each other for who they are.”

“I think the whole thing is a big love letter about friendship,” Badgely says, referring to Sam and Joel’s relationship over the course of the series. “We never see shows about it. Usually it's about romanticized love. To me, this is just a beautiful way of studying how to just love someone in your life and how to lift them up.”

Emotions, as you might suspect, are not so superficial among the cast and crew of Someone Somewhere as they burst from their pores like geysers in Yosemite National Park. So you can imagine what saying goodbye to one final season must have been like. (Even though, as everyone told me, they think the series ends in a place where there's no real goodbye. “These characters will move on,” says Hiller.)

Garrison remembers that when it came time to wrap Everett up on set after her final take, everyone involved in the show came together to give her a rousing ovation – clapping, hooting and hollering for 20 minutes.

“We are a family. These are people who cry and laugh behind the camera when we shoot,” says Everett. Due to COVID protocols, Season 3 marked the first time the show was able to host a proper wrap party, and it did so in Chicago. “I remember just looking at everyone on the bus and saying, 'I'm happy.' This is what happiness feels like.' I've never said that like that in my life. I just felt, honest to God, happy.”

In its own way it was a miracle.