Out in the Middle West: On “Somebody Somewhere”
Somebody Somewhere, the Max series starring the dynamic comedian, actress, and singer Bridget Everett, opens with a montage of pure Midwest sublime: cornfields, chickens, tractors, and a sign for a 24-hour diner. It screams down-home, feel-good Americana. While invoking a certain sentimentality and rural quaintness, the images also signal the baggage that a small-town, culturally static Midwestern life presumably carries: rigid traditionalism, compulsory heterosexuality, white power, and reactionary populism. The 1950s crooner Connie Conway’s “Kansas State Line” plays atop the montage—a song that laments being stuck in the “Middle West” and expresses a desire for “wide-open spaces, a life that is free.” It’s an opening that dares the viewer to relish in persistent stereotypes about small-town Midwest homogeneity and closed-mindedness, and the supposedly narrow politics and possibilities that the region is capable of inspiring.
While it does not gloss over the enduring prejudices and emotional hang-ups that permeate rural life, Somebody Somewhere effortlessly upends viewers’ expectations of what life must be like in Manhattan, Kansas, the small college town home to Kansas State University where Everett actually grew up. It depicts the capacity for loving, supportive queer community and non-traditional kinship structures in a space normally deemed inherently hostile to such social relations. It does so without casting an overly sentimental picture of what it means to be a queer and/or un-partnered and childless woman in the rural Midwest—homophobia, the pressure to marry and general suspicion towards single women well into their middle age prevail. But Somebody Somewhere captures the capacity for everyday people who exist outside normative gender and sexual binaries, or familial arrangements, to forge fulfilling relationships and live emotionally rich lives far from the presumably enlightened inclusiveness of urban enclaves. The show flirts with a radical politics of family abolition, which rejects the privatized, capitalist, and often treacherously violent structure of the heterosexual nuclear family unit and instead envisions a radical democratization of love, dependency, and support outside of that traditional structure. Amid the cornfields and deceptively old-fashioned aesthetics of rural Kansas, Somebody Somewhere suggests, lies what Abolish the Family author Sophie Lewis calls “nooks and crannies” where “people, against all odds, are seeking to devise liberatory and queer—which is to say anti-property modes of care.”
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The first season of Somebody Somewhere charts the experience of Sam (Everett), a middle-aged loner with a cynical edge but no shortage of spunk, who recently moved back home to Manhattan to take care of her dying sister Holly. With Holly now gone, Sam navigates intense feelings of grief, and crushing aimlessness, struggling to shake well-worn patterns of self-effacement and reclusiveness. While working a dead-end and windowless test-grading site, she reconnects (somewhat against her will) with an old high-school show choir member, Joel (played by Jeff Hiller) a gangly, unstylish, and instantly lovable gay man who is something of a fanboy for Sam and her mighty singing voice. He draws up the courage to invite Sam to something called “Choir Practice” at Faith Presbyterian, a church inside a dying mall. “Yeah, but I’m not really a church person,” Sam responds dismissively, to which Joel assures “No, no—it’s church-adjacent. It’s fun.”
Reluctantly, Sam shows. What she finds is part social club, part elaborate performance space for the town’s queer and allied residents—a different, but still ultimately sacred space. Joel admits to Sam that the event isn’t explicitly sanctioned by his church, revealing a mischievous side to Joel’s corn-fed, choir-boy facade that continues to unfurl throughout the series. But it serves as a truly precious, even holy experience for the town’s LGBTQ+ community and other town misfits, who have the opportunity to sing, play, and revel in a rare opportunity to let it all hang out and be their true selves no matter how flamboyant or corny. It is at Choir Practice where Sam will ultimately rediscover both her singing voice and her place in Manhattan, especially as her own family struggles through her mother’s worsening alcohol addiction, her father’s declining capacity to manage the family farm, and her Christian-girl-autumn-coded sister Trish’s soon-to-be upended marriage. As everything appears to be falling apart at the seams, Choir Practice gives Sam a safe place to land and release, to feel radically, unexpectedly at home.
Somebody Somewhere’s tender presentation of a vibrant, supportive queer community in the rural Midwest disrupts tired “metronormative” stereotypes about rural spaces being little more than “gay America’s closet.” But it does more than simply say “queer and trans people exist and thrive, even here”—an important, but ultimately limited analytic that could, in less deft hands, come across as tokenizing or inauthentically sanguine. Rather, Somebody Somewhere offers a stage for portraying the full, complex, and sometimes contradictory subjectivity of rural queer and trans people. The queer and trans characters in Somebody Somewhere are not embarrassed or deceptive about who they are. For example there’s Joel, but also the trans man soil scientist with a heart of gold Fred Rococo, played by drag king and comedian Murray Hill, and Tiffani, a lesbian veterinarian, played by Mercedes White, who welcome Sam into their crew. At one of their first brunches at the local spot, Fred, while delightfully decked out in a quintessential dad outfit of head-to-toe Kansas State University purple gear, teases a teenage waiter who refers to him as sir, and then ma’am out of confusion over Fred’s gender, quipping “Hey, you had it right the first time.”
While archetypal, the show’s characters do not map perfectly onto performances of queerness more frequently portrayed by mainstream LGBTQ+ organizations and media. They don’t despise or feel trapped by Manhattan and its smalltown Midwest aesthetics. They covet conventional and sometimes cringy things, such as when Sam uncovers (and relentlessly mocks) Joel’s “dream board,” where he envisions a future of marriage, six children, and a kitchen equipped with a Vitamix. They unapologetically have school spirit: Fred, a professor at and booster for Kansas State University, drives a ludicrous KSU party bus, equipped with fuzzy purple steering wheel cover, where Sam and their crew of middle-aged, childless forty-somethings frequently let loose. And they retain relationships to institutions that are often understood as typically unwelcoming to LGBTQ+ people, especially in rural locales. Season 1 covers Joel’s complicated relationship to church, for example, where, despite reference to challenges he’s faced as a gay man in rural Christian spaces, he admits “this is still where I find comfort.” In this way, Somebody Somewhere offers a “geographically contingent version of “outness,” as scholar Carley Thomsen writes in her study of rural queerness, where its queer and trans characters disrupt the “confessional performance” of mainstream LGBTQ politics and art and instead offer new possibilities for what LGBTQ identity, community, and liberation can look like.
The show narrates queer and trans characters in ways that negate old tropes about being stuck in the closet in backwards small-town America, refusing to reduce them and their humanity to the mere fact of their visibility. They are neither self-consciously transgressive, nor hopelessly repressed. They are simply unglamorous, everyday people seeking purpose, love, and community, and running into no shortage of hijinks along the way.
To be sure, Somebody Somewhere does not artificially erase the reality of queer and transphobia in the Middle West. To give one example, Sam’s sister, Trish, initially expresses a “love the sinner hate the sin” sentiment towards their deceased sister Holly, who was a lesbian. And while the show does not explicitly reference up-to-the-minute Kansan politics, the state’s anti-LGBTQ currents continue to make national headlines – most recently, the state’s Republican legislature recently overrode Democratic Governor Laura Kelly’s veto of a devastating anti-trans law championed by notable anti-LGBTQ bigot and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach. At the same time, the show also captures how rural straight cissexuals actually quite easily accept the humanity of queer and trans people, contrary to their usual presentation as hateful in popular discourse. After seeing her dad, Ed, played by Mike Hagerty, struggle to keep up and afford their farm in his old age, Sam asks Fred for help. In one of the more touching scenes of the show, as they stand in the middle of Ed’s crops, Fred expresses to Ed that he is a “real good steward of his land.” This leads the otherwise emotionally padlocked Ed to tear up. He then confides to Fred about his wife’s alcoholism and enduring feelings of failure as a father, due to his tendency to keep things in. Fred comforts Ed, letting him know it was going to be okay. Without having to say so, the scene portrays the uncomplicated and natural bond between these two men, where Fred’s transness is neither a problem Ed needed to confront nor something Fred felt compelled to acknowledge at all.
In season two, which ends with Fred’s wedding to an old grad school love named Susan at Sam’s family’s farm, Fred honors Ed (and Hagerty, who tragically died prior to the filming of Season 2), whom he recalls feeling “such a deep connection with.” “You know, we were just two guys, who shared the love of the land,” Fred continued, “it wasn’t about him accepting me, it wasn’t about being nice. He just saw me. That’s a rare thing, no matter where I am.”
Beyond its refreshing presentation of rural queerness, Somebody Somewhere also offers a radical vision of community care that is strikingly untethered from the normative, private family unit. Coursing through the show’s two seasons are examples of unpartnered, childless, and middle-aged forty-somethings (queer or otherwise) building structures of support for one another. Sam and Joel’s deepening friendship offers a particularly illustrative example of how caregiving need not remain tied to the private realm of the bio-family, nor need it come from traditional romantic partnership. Where we often see television shows explore the depths and trials of sexual relationships or familial love, Season 1 ends with Sam expressing her love and appreciation to Joel, now her best friend, which she does by singing him a song (written by Everett) that has the lyrics “you brought me home.” Season 2 opens with them living together in Holly’s old house (now Sam’s), as Joel rents out his own on Airbnb. Their lives are wonderfully entwined, equipped with precious rituals like making “teeny-tinis,” getting their steps in while playing “pound or pass” with none-the-wiser park-goers, and giggling themselves to sleep from separate rooms in the house. It’s strikingly rare to see such a rich depiction of middle-aged life and platonic companionship outside the bounds of marriage and children, where subjects are neither existentially plagued by their lack of conventional family nor all-consumed by high-powered careers that presumably fill the void. It is especially rare to portray a woman that seems, if not perfectly content at her lot in life, certainly unburdened by the task of finding long-term romantic partnership or having children. Indeed, even as Sam confronts demons in both seasons, she has no shortage of reliable community, emotional support, and yes, even sex.
In spotlighting Sam and Joel’s unconventional experiment in cohabitation and caregiving, Somebody Somewhere gestures toward a vision of a world where one’s relationship to blood family or matrimony does not dictate legibility, access to resources, and happiness. Joel and Sam’s community comes in striking contrast to the troubled dynamics of Sam’s family, which pivots primarily around her mother’s long-unaddressed alcoholism and, in the second season, her stroke. While Sam does love and feel an obligation to her family, it’s clear that growing up with a resentful, addict mother and a father who refused to acknowledge the problem caused deep pain for both Sam and her sister Trish, in ways that do not get suitably resolved.
The bitter shortcomings of the conventional family similarly course through Trish’s plotline, who finds out at the end of season one that her husband had been cheating on her with her best friend and business partner. The revelation shatters the “faith and family” façade, as Sam put it, that Trish labored to maintain. Thus, like many prestige shows, Somebody Somewhere, explores the accumulation of disappointments and injuries that vex family relationships, revealing the tragic and suffocating reality of nuclear familial dynamics in the United States. It echoes Sophie Lewis’s insight that “for all purposes except capital accumulation, the promise of family falls abjectly short of itself.” But in depicting Joel and Sam’s unconventional household, the show also pushes us beyond a space of critiquing the family as “blackmail passing itself off as fate.” Rather, it demonstrates the capacity of regular people in middle America to construct non-traditional structures of dependency and care premised neither on the punishing obligation of shared genetics nor on married coupledom.
The mere decision to live happily outside the boundaries of the heteropatriarchal family is not, of course, in and of itself a complete politics. As many family abolitionist scholars might argue, truly demolishing the family form will require a radical structural shift in resources and political culture, beginning at least with policies like universal healthcare, affordable housing, and other economic programs that will create stable alternatives for people to untether from such arrangements. But Somebody Somewhere’s tender portrayal of rural queer community and non-normative relationships, and its insistence that these bonds can create nourishment even in rustic geographies, serves as a generative site for dreaming of alternative futures where all people receive the care and affection promised but so often unfulfilled by the nuclear family.