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A Somebody Somewhere Spectacle
Bridget Everett’s HBO half-hour counted its victories in developments modest by TV standards and monumental on the scale of everyday life.
Most TV has become relentlessly plot-driven, furiously scouring out any scene that doesn’t move the story forward, and even within a network sitcom’s circling status quo structure, the most successful new comedies of the past several years have a big will-they, won’t-they, a spinoff tie-in, or a hooky premise that promises tension and surprise. As the series builds, its major developments match the standard adjustment-to-a-new-place narrative beats: Sam meets Joel ( Jeff Hiller) and Fred ( Murray Hill), and these new friends introduce her to a group of queer performers who help her refind her singing voice. Even compared with a show like Reservation Dogs, which drew intense emotional catharsis out of intimate moments, Somebody Somewhere remained restrained, precisely because Sam doesn’t have the deep communal connections that would allow her sister’s death to resonate throughout the story as broadly.
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