Thanksgiving Special: "Somebody Somewhere," "Schitt's Creek," and the Comfort of Small Town Queer Utopia
These two very special series create an island of queer acceptance and love, providing escape from a world that feels increasingly queerphobic.
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Special note: Today’s edition of Omnivorous is dedicated to Melissa Welshans, the Sam to my Joel and the Jocelyn to my Moira.
Today is Thanksgiving and, as one might expect, I’m spending it with my family in West Virginia. As frustrated as I sometimes am with my parents, in general I’m extremely grateful that, while they might be conservative, they’re not Trump partisans, and they have never been anything other than welcoming to myself and my partner.
In some ways, my parents’ house is a little oasis of sanity in a state (West Virginia) that has become ever more unmoored reality and from anything remotely resembling political sanity. If you’re familiar with my writing at all, you know that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about my own status as a sort of Appalachian expatriate, someone who yearns for my home even as I know that it has become so inhospitable for queer folk that I find it impossible to ever imagine a future for myself.
I know I’m not alone in this feeling. During my recent attendance at the Appalachian Queer Film Festival, I was struck again and again by how much this outing meant to the people who still call the state home. While Appalachians are proud of their home and want to live there, it can be a difficult (and sometimes dangerous) place for queer folks, particularly for trans folk. Given how much the Republican Party has made persecuting them a key part of their efforts to attract voters, it certainly seems as if this is only going to be more the case in the next four years.
For this reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about the places where we can find queer utopias, those places that, real or imagined, can give us a bit of shelter and respite from the outside world, a world that grows more transphobic and queerphobic with every passing day. The Appalachian Queer Film Festival is obviously one such site, but of late I’ve also been turning to the small screen to find a bit of escape. In addition to revisiting Schitt’s Creek–one of my favorite TV offerings of the last decade–I’ve also been losing myself every week in the sweet little gem that is HBO’s Somebody Somewhere.
I’ve written here before about my deep and abiding love for the series Somebody Somewhere, which is one of the true unsung gems on HBO. It’s one of those shows that just seems to get its characters, particularly the queer ones, and though there have been many on-screen examples of the abiding love between straight women and their gay besties, I’ve seldom seen one that feels quite as right as that between Sam and Joel (Bridget Everett and Jeff Hiller).
The third season has seen these two characters go through quite a lot, particularly since Joel has finally found love and romance with Brad Schraeder (Tim Bagley). However, they’ve eventually worked through the growing pains involved with their changing relationship, and it’s clear that theirs is a bond that will endure the test of time. They might find romantic love, but they’ll always occupy a special place in one another’s lives.
I find Joel a particularly interesting character, both because he’s a rare middle-aged queer on TV but also because he’s a queer person of faith. Moreover, he’s also someone who has had to navigate the often-fraught waters of small-town queer life but, as Sam points out, he still has retained an eternal optimism and positivity that allows him to spread joy to everyone around him.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t gestures toward the sometimes unpleasant realities of smalltown life. In one third season episode he has an encounter with someone who bullied him in high school and, while it doesn't dwell on the specifics, it’s still clear it has left a deep impact on Joel, who doesn’t quite know how to respond. Jeff Hiller’s performance in this moment is quite heartwrenching, and it’s a poignant and powerful reminder that, while Somebody Somewhere is all about happiness, the realities of the world are not entirely absent.
Overall, though, Somebody Somewhere has been far more utopian in its presentation of small town queer life. Sam and Joel have forged quite a little queer family of their own–including the fabulous Fred, played by Murray Hill–and it’s beautiful to see them all spend time together, whether celebrating Fred’s wedding, playing ball, or celebrating Thanksgiving together. True, the series does take place in the college town of Manhattan, Kansas, so perhaps this little slice of queer utopia makes sense but, even so, I still see this show as a true blessing, a sign that queer folks can thrive wherever they live.
Schitt’s Creek, like Somebody Somewhere, seems to take place in a world that is both very like and yet very unlike our own. Daniel Levy has been explicit about his desire to create a setting where homophobia just simply doesn’t exist, and that’s very obvious from the jump. For all that the residents of Schitt’s Creek seem more than a little stymied by the Roses and their numerous foibles, David’s pansexuality is rarely an issue, at least not in terms of acceptance (though it causes him and Stevie some issues, both during their initial hookup and afterward).
In fact, it’s Eugene Levy’s Johnny who has more of an issue, and he even goes so far as to remark to Roland (Chris Elliott) that he rather wishes his son would pick one or the other. Roland, for his part, says that it’s really not up to them to decide who their children love. This is really quite a remarkable thing to come from Roland, who is hardly the type of person to have sophisticated thoughts about grown children and their love lives. Yet in a way it’s fitting, too, and it shows that there are many surprises to be found in Schitt’s Creek.
Indeed, as the series goes on, it becomes clear that Schitt’s Creek is a little slice of queer acceptance where any of us would like to live. Once David gets together with Noah Reid’s Patrick, the town celebrates right along with them as they start to build a life, and I’m sure I’m not the only one whose heart melted a little when they all came together to help throw them one of the most beautiful and heartwarming wedding that’s ever been seen on television.
I would even go so far as to suggest that it’s precisely Schitt’s Creek’s utopian acceptance that allows David the chance to grow and become open to forming a relationship with another person. There are hints scattered throughout the series that he’s never really had this opportunity, surrounded as he is by shallow people who only care about themselves and how much money he can give them. In this little town in the middle of nowhere–which, I might add, bears more than a little resemblance to my own rinky-dink town of Cameron, West Virginia–he not only finds Patrick but also a place in which he can truly flourish as the queer person he has always wanted to be.
Perhaps the best thing about a show like Schitt’s Creek is that it makes real for us as viewers the possibility that small towns don’t have to be bastions of intolerance and ignorance but can, instead, be little islands of peace in times of turmoil and trouble. Like David, we can feel as if we are coming home to a place that will love us and welcome us in, no matter who we love or what kind of life we want to build. And who, after all, wouldn’t want to marry someone like Patrick, who serenades his beloved with an acoustic cover of Tina Turner’s “The Best.”
I guess what it comes down to is this. I’m eternally grateful for series like Somebody Somewhere and Schitt’s Creek. I remarked to a friend the other day that watching them often makes me feel like I’m coming home. It might be more precise and accurate to say that watching them feels like coming back to the home that I wished existed but which has always hovered in some part of my mind, a phantasm that, for the foreseeable future at least, must remain constrained to the world of television fiction.
I first wrote about what I’ve called small town gay utopia a few years ago, when I’d just finished my first watch of Schitt’s Creek and we were all living through the dreary, dark times of the pandemic. Now that we’re facing four more years of a Trump administration and all of its chaos and horror–I’m particularly dismayed at what’s in store for our trans brothers and sisters–it seems to me that series like these are all the more necessary. While Schitt’s Creek finished its run in 2020 and Somebody Somewhere is now wrapping up its third and final season, I’m very glad that we have had these television shows to give us all the comfort and joy that we’ll be lacking in our real lives.
Sometimes, we just need to escape and I know that I, for one, will be doing just that.