‘Somebody Somewhere’ Knows We’re Here
Finally, a show sees that the Midwest is not a barren, depressing landscape full of stock characters and this is why we loved it
I’ve been crying for days. Happy tears, sad tears, anticipatory tears, little tears, sloppy tears, all the many tear varieties. It’s not so bad. I’ll get to that.
It’s just that we all need our people. And we need to see our people, in real life and in our stories. I’ll get to that, too.
It’s all because of Somebody Somewhere.
One of the things that has always aggravated me about how Midwesterners are portrayed in our pop culture landscape is, well, practically everything. It has made me roll my eyes hard countless times, seeing all these Church Ladies and beer-drinking, beer-burping yokels representing our large swath of the country, one note characters that don’t align as familiar to me as a lifelong Midwesterner. This is not to say we don’t have our share of sanctimonious, closed-minded bigots and empty-headed bros; of course we do. Every region does. We just don’t have the exclusive rights to them that Hollywood would have you believe.
It is true that Chicago, where I am from, is both not Midwestern and, not not Midwestern. Chicago is a bustling, multicultural, real city, but there is something essentially earthy and unpretentious about it that reminds you that you are still in the Middle West, even with a buzz-in Gucci store here and tight-bodied yogis in their Lululemon gear there. In Chicago, people don’t care who you know, generally. They’re not trying to figure out if you are on a ladder worth climbing, or looking over your shoulder to see if there might be someone better to invest time in who just walked in the door. Yes, I am speaking in broad brushstrokes, but this is what I’ve observed here. The people don’t make me feel twitchy and paranoid. I recognize that Chicago is not a true Midwestern experience, though.
In my late teens and early twenties, I lived in Lawrence, Kansas. Lawrence is one of those blue dot college towns, like Austin, TX and Athens, GA, that often bucks the surrounding area but is full of many different kinds of people: Students, academics, artists, activists, regular folks, wanderers, Bible Belt refugees. It was here that I met the best friends of my life — radical feminists, people with the best book and music recommendations, activists of every stripe — and formed the opinion that still I hold today, 30-plus years later: The best people, truly the best, are shaped in the Midwest. (Calm down, not all and only Midwesterners.) Scoff at me if you must. Tell me that I am just an uninformed, sheltered, unsophisticated yahoo myself. That’s fine. If you’re someone who is comfortable believing that nearly 69 million people in the U.S. are laughable idiots, that’s on you. You don’t know my people, and Hollywood (whatever that even means) is partly to blame here.
All these years of seeing good people painted with the same predictable palette of loaded, lazy tropes is why I loved Max’s Somebody Somewhere with all of my heart. I have not dined of hot dishes*, I know not of football, I have probably never uttered “ope” in my life, and I think ranch dressing is the Devil’s dipping sauce, but it’s only now that I can comfortably say I’m a Midwesterner without qualifying it with, “But I’m also a Jew and from Chicago, so that neutralizes things.” I’m still a Midwesterner and Sam (Bridget Everett), Joel (Jeff Hiller) and all their friends and family from Manhattan, Kansas helped me to recognize this not with embarrassment but a little pride.
In addition to not insulting Midwesterners and the Midwest writ large with stereotypical characterizations, what Somebody Somewhere also did was navigate internal weather systems with so much nuance, humor and dignity. Considering how resolute they were with no easy, pat portrayals, this is not a surprise. Sam is hilarious, bawdy, warm, kind, fun-loving and also not happy. She is not that trope of the laughing clown crying on the inside, either: she is all those things and sad. I won’t even say depressed. She seems like she has a significant weight of sadness yoked to her even when she’s sparkling. Sam is not a saint, just as none of us are. She is quick to cut someone out when she feels worried that they’ll ditch her. Sam is protective of herself and that is ultimately an act of self-love, even if it behaves like self-sabotage at times.
Joel, Sam’s best friend, sees her. He laughs with her, shares with her, cries with her, walks with her, and, most important, he sees her. At the beginning of the series, which now has had three runs and just had its season finalé, Joel had to win over Sam’s friendly but stubborn guardedness, the way that a suitor has to the one they are pursuing, proving to them that they can be trusted. Sam has seen some things offscreen; she’s been burned, does not enjoy making herself feel exposed and trust is hard won. Sam is so at the bottom when we meet her, shortly after her sister’s death from cancer and adrift about her dreams and future, that she cannot believe Joel is as into her as he is. (Joel is gay.) He has admired and adored her from afar for years; she barely noticed him growing up. But they fall into a very natural, middle of life, comfortable and close friendship that is the very distillation of platonic love.
I could write for pages and pages about what the characters of this college town in the middle of Kansas have meant to me. The way her surviving sister, Trish, so intense, moody, prickly (oh, yes, she reminds me a bit of myself) came around to seeing how Sam was the strong one, how Sam was the one rescuing the buttoned-up Trish with a loving, fun-loving, real community. The gentle but real love between Joel and Brad; the way Brad accepted that Joel needed more, and that included the church he missed and more personal time with Sam. The absolutely unforgettable Fred Rococo, a transgender person living in (gasp!) Kansas, married, living his best life. The LGBTQ people in their circle of friends, so deeply recognizable and accurate to me, both from my time as a Chicagoan and, yes, living in Lawrence. The snobs will think this is an idealized portrait of life in a mid-sized Midwestern town. No, it is not. This is reality, or at least part of it.
I could also write for pages and pages about the emotional honesty of the actors, especially Bridget Everett and Jeff Hiller. The way that Bridget’s Sam laughs a little to herself as she riffs; the way that Jeff’s Joel — well, all his emotions wash over his face sometimes — he turns red, he laughs at himself, he gets overheated, he cries, he laughs at himself again, he closes up into a scared little gay boy without support, he delights in Sam, he gets a big, toothy grin that is infectious. The way Sam looks in the mirror of her new car when things start to go right for her, and she brightens and sits up a bit at what she sees in the reflection. The way Joel notices that she shaved her legs in season two when they’d had growing pains as friends, and that was what broke the ice between them. Her courage at finally letting Viglundur, a.k.a. Iceland, know she’s ready for…something. The grace of the writers and creators at leaving this note private between them.
These moments. These beautiful, intimate, real, simple-but-breathtaking moments. Oh, how I have smiled and cried. The fact that the makers were confident enough in the power of their storytelling and storytellers enough to not just let Bridget do the heavy-lifting of a using a song to close out every episode — and she is a singer beyond description — tells you something.
Thank you, glorious Bridget Everett. Thank you, sensitive, wonderful actors. Thank you, showrunners. Thank you, HBO Max. Those of us who loved the show have been SO hungry for this honesty, courage, hilarity and human dignity.
If this is the end of Somebody Somewhere, I am actually okay with that. It ended on such an exquisite, perfect note that the idea of it continuing for another season makes me nervous. Let’s leave it alone. Or maybe that is my wounded, tender-to-the-bone inner-Sam. I have no idea. I will say, though, I’ve clocked in my time of trying to muddle through one-dimensional, stock characters meant to represent The Idiotic Midwest (sorry, but I am looking at you, Coen Brothers) and I have no more of it to give.
XO,
Marla
* Casseroles, though? Yes, love ‘em.
Marla Rose is cofounder of VeganStreet.com.
