HBO’s Duplass brothers-produced comedy might not be laugh-out-loud funny—but its gentle, fragile humour is special nonetheless, writes Clarisse Loughrey.
Somebody Somewhere: Season 1
What I…what I…what I gotta do,” Bridget Everett sings, her voice low and bluesy. “What I gotta do to get that d*** in my mouth?” This is the Everett that New York City’s cabaret circuit knows so well: a comedy songstress with a reputation for ending her shows by motorboating a member of the audience. She’s an underrated but treasured part of the new wave of foul-mouthed, triumphant female comics—the favourite opening act of Amy Schumer’s, who’s also popped up in Trainwreck, Difficult People and Girls.
But in Somebody Somewhere, an HBO series created by theatre performers Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, the Everett we meet might as well have crash-landed from a different planet. Her character, Sam, has none of the bawdy confidence. She lacks almost all self-possession. It’s like somebody took her, dropped her, then tried to hastily tape the pieces back together.
There’s more in common here, perhaps, with Everett’s widely praised turn as the mother of a wannabe rapper in 2017’s Patti Cake$, but Somebody Somewhere is so raw that teeters into the confessional. It’s semi-autobiographical: a kind of alternate history in which Everett never breached the mainstream. Sam, who’s in her 40s, first moved back to her hometown of Manhattan, Kansas, in order to care for her sister Holly, after a cancer diagnosis.
Holly has been dead for six months now. Sam still sleeps on her sofa, because she can’t bear to clear out the bedroom. She muddles her way through a job marking exam papers. Death hasn’t brought Sam’s family closer, as these tragedies tend to do, but spun them out onto wildly different planes of existence. Her mother (Jane Brody) drinks. Her father (Mike Hagerty) retreats in banality. Her sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison) fusses over some illusion of suburban perfection. Somebody Somewhere leaves Sam with an uncomfortable and seemingly unanswerable question: who is she, now that the person she dedicated her entire soul to is gone? What’s left beyond that Holly-sized chasm?
The series features both of the Duplass brothers, Jay and Mark, in executive producer positions. The pair were core members of the mumblecore movement that took over American independent cinema in the early 2000s, with stories about listless young adults, shot without pretension or the strict demands of narrative structure. Somebody Somewhere is mumblecore in its next stage of life. It’s not as erratic or experimental in its style, but is characterised chiefly by a constant, low hum of melancholy that drains the colour out of the American midwest.
I wouldn’t exactly describe the show as laugh-out-loud, though that shouldn’t imply that its gentle, somewhat fragile humour is inherently lesser. Nor does it banish Somebody, Somewhere outside the strict borders of comedy. There is lightness here, framed as a tender affection for small town dramas—the tell-all memoir of a former classmate accusing Sam of sucking on tampons, or prayers said over a Tupperware box containing the dead body of Dingaling the snake.
Sam’s bitterness is counterbalanced by the resilient optimism of her new friend Joel (the naturally funny Jeff Hiller). He looked up to her when they were in high school but she flat-out doesn’t remember him. However his adulation of a Sam that was guides her to a new understanding of the Sam that is—and the slow decay of self that happened along the way. At school, she was the star of the show choir (think Glee), and known for her legendary Peter Gabriel performance. Joel immediately invites her to his semi-secret choir practice at the local church, which really looks and sounds a lot more like an open mic night.
“I don’t know what it’s going to take to be happy,” Sam eventually confesses to Joel. It’s one thing to fall short of your ambitions, another not to know what you’ve even fallen short of. Maybe music can soothe the pain a little. Maybe her family will eventually put their differences aside. But Somebody, Somewhere is brave enough not to chase conclusions, positive or negative in nature. Sam isn’t on the easy road—and that’s OK, because I’m in it for the long haul.
