Sunday's Cool: We Are All 'Somebody, Somewhere'

HBO's remarkable series understands that home is a source of both grief and salvation, sometimes all at once.

This is Clusterhuck, my newsletter about faith, culture and a flourishing future for all! I’m glad you’re here. I can only do this through the support of my readers, and I’m grateful for every one I’ve got. If you’d like to join, just click here. You’ll get a free seven-day trial, including access to all the archives. 

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The last time I recommended a TV show on this Substack, it took about 24 hours before the internet learned that one of its actors had once publicly bragged about raping a woman, then later said he was just joking and now is being defended by the show’s stars in an exceedingly disappointing statement that doesn’t really state anything at all. So I’m a little hesitant to wade back into TV show-recommending waters. One of the really depressing things about the general lack of accountability for bad people in public places is how it makes all of us culpable. 

But once more into the breach, dear subscribers. 

One of the first publications I remember reading was World Magazine. In fact, it’s where I technically got my first byline, when I was 12 years old or something. World is a Christian rag that claims to offer “sound journalism, grounded in facts and Biblical truth” and for a long time, that was a pretty good summary of its whole thing, albeit with a politically and socially conservative bias. 

I was just a kid when the magazine gave its cover to profile a gay man who went to one of those Pray the Gay Away situations and was now living his best Christian life with his wife and church and ministry and hallelujah, praise God, yada yada. This was pretty indicative of how World covered LGBTQ issues. 

I can’t find this profile now (this was close to 30 years ago) so I won’t get into too many details since I don’t trust my memory. But a few months later, I do remember that World published a short follow-up article. The man in question had been spotted at a gay bar, which amounted to a scandal. And for some reason, his statement has stuck with me all these years: “I don’t have the perfect response for why I was there,” he said. “This place just means something special to me.” 

I thought of that again while watching HBO’s marvelous Somebody, Somewhere, which just dropped its second season. It stars comedian and cabaret singer Bridget Everett as Sam, a Manhattan, Kansas native spiraling down a midlife crisis drain following the death of her sister. Left with a job she doesn’t like and a biological family who mostly don’t like her, Sam falls face first into a found family through her co-worker Joel, who helps run semi-sanctioned cabaret nights out of a church in the mall. 

Pop culture depictions of the midwest run the gamut from stuffy accuracy (Alexander Payne’s filmography) to cringey caricature (The Middle, Parks and Rec). Somebody, Somewhere gets the balance right by capturing the midwest at its most dispiriting (empty shopping malls, endless stretches of wire-fenced residential housing) and its most exhilarating. Here, the latter is represented by the colorful cast of characters who attend Joel’s weekly “Choir Practice” — the queer, creative, free spirited crowd who relish a place where they can be themselves. 

This is my midwest experience, and I think it’s a lot of people’s. Scratch the surface of any quiet, ho-hum community in Kansas or Iowa or Nebraska or the Dakotas and you’ll find a thriving community of artists and weirdos. Many of these artists and weirdos, by the way, are the lifeblood of their local fringe leftist movements; the first, last and only line of defense for their community’s unions, voting rights, racial justice movements and what have you. This is something a lot of self-proclaimed “liberals” seem to forget when they goofily shitpost about just letting red states reap what they sow in Covid deaths or gun violence stats. 

It’s with this understanding of the strange tensions in midwest dichotomies that Joel’s decision to host these kinda, sorta clandestine gatherings in a church makes total sense. Joel tells Sam that he knows a church is a strange pick for a venue, but says that the space still means something to him — the inverse of the man profiled in World Magazine. Joel also does not have the perfect answer for why they’re meeting in a church. Somebody Somewhere brings a lot of nuance to its understanding of the church’s role in the rural midwest — a source of both a lot of trauma and a lot of salvation, sometimes at the same time for the same people. 

Obviously, this impulse has sometimes kept people in unhealthy communities or relationships longer than advisable, and I don’t want anyone to hear me say that you should tough out abusive situations for an occasional good vibe. But I also think that because life is complicated and very few things are all good or all bad, that a lot of people have learned to live in tension with spaces and communities that have been a source of grief and a source of salvation. Maybe all of us have, in one way or another.

It’s in this community that Sam begins to step back into the identity she once saw for herself: as a singer. She’s got a great voice, and on her very first night, Joel talks her into going on stage to sing a pretty, homespun take on Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up.” It’s a pretty on-the-nose theme song for the show.

This also captures the show’s idiosyncratic energy, which is somewhere between funny and sad, tackling heavy themes with a light touch and investing beauty into banality. It’s why we can’t leave these spaces — be it a church, a community, or even a region of the country. They just mean something special.