HBO’s series ‘Somebody Somewhere,” just ended its three season run. It features former New York City Cabaret performer Bridget Everett as Sam, who moves back to Manhattan, Kansas to take care of her ailing sister who passed away before the series begins.
The series is a careful and intimate portrayal of friendship, family and love that expresses true feelings without expounding on the traumas the characters have faced in their lives.
Instead, you can feel how the wonderfully realized characters have dealt with past traumas and have recovered and risen up to find happiness and belonging.
For Sam, everyone is changing around her. She finds herself stuck at making decision for her own well being. There’s a heartbreaking sequence of events where she goes to a kennel and finds the most adorable dog ever. Instead of adopting on the spot, she hesitates to “think about it.” The next day, after admitting she loves this dog she goes back to adopt it, but to her surprise and regret somebody beat her to the punch.
It was a devastating moment, but encapsulated her life up to this point.
Rebecca Nicholson writes in The Guardian:
It is remarkable the extent to which this show can and does burrow into your heart. Joel reminds Sam of a time when she first moved back to Manhattan, when she warned him that she was not good friendship material. If it occasionally seems as if the changes experienced by the characters in this final season have been incremental, then this is a reminder of how much they have grown. Life’s brutal milestones continue to interrupt Sam’s day-to-day. There are money troubles; health troubles; that persistent, nagging question as to whether a “new Sam” will ever emerge, and what she will look like if she does. But these plot developments fade in and out, as mere snapshots of life, while the real substance is in friendship, and what people can, should and do mean to each other.
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