The Poignancy of Friendship in "Somebody Somewhere"
The quietly hilarious HBO series provides one of the most richly textured portrayals of queer/straight friendships in popular culture.
It was the fall of 2009, and I was just about to start graduate school. During the departmental orientation, I met the woman who was to become one of the most important people in my life. Blonde and ebullient and filled with an undeniable joie de vivre, I knew from the moment that we met we were going to be best friends forever, and so it’s proved to be. Even now, well over a decade later, it’s very rare for us not to chat at least briefly every day.
To some degree, our friendship was an unsurprising development. Like me, Melissa was from a small town in the middle of nowhere and, like me, she loved to laugh and to have fun. We were a meeting of the minds and of kindred souls; we just got one another on some deep primal level. While I had and have many friends from my days in graduate school, the bond I share with her is one born of a similar heritage and way of looking at the world.
Oh, and of course there was also the fact that she was a buxom straight woman and I was a gay man.
If there’s one stereotype that has long accompanied the representation of queer people in both popular culture and in life, it’s that every gay man has to have their straight girl BFF, just as every straight girl has to have her gay bestie. Like all such stereotypes, there’s more than a little bit of truth to this, as I can personally attest. From a very young age I seemed to excel at making friends with women, and so every time I see such bonds depicted in a poignant or textured way in popular media, I feel, as they say, seen.
Which brings us to Somebody Somewhere, the critical darling which just finished its second season on HBO. Though, as many have noted, it may not have the bombast or the heaviness of some of the network’s other marquee series–such as House of the Dragon, Succession, or Barry–it has become a steady favorite, particularly among queer viewers. Part of this has to do with the way that it excels at creating a meaningful, sweet, and understated portrait of rural queer life but, just as importantly, in my view, it’s because it is one of the most poignant portrayals of a gay man/straight woman friendship I’ve ever seen.
The series focuses on Bridget Everett’s Sam, a middle-aged bartender who returns home to her small town of Manhattan, Kansas to care for her sister. When the first season begins her sister has just passed away, and Sam struggles to deal with the grief from that and to figure out her place in life and, as the series’ two seasons have progressed, we’ve seen her slowly build a life for herself. From the very beginning, one of the most important relationships in Sam’s life has been with Jeff Hiller’s Joel. Though they were only passingly familiar to each other at first, it soon became clear–just as it did with Melissa and me–that theirs is a match made in heaven.
Each of them feels a little bit like an outsider in their world. Moreover, each brings something uniquely meaningful to their bond. Joel is the eternal optimist, and he is very clearly the submissive partner in their relationship; in fact, he’s worshiped and idolized Sam from afar for years. At the same time, it’s also clear how much he works to soften Sam’s rough edges, ultimately becoming one of the few people that she allows into the inner parts of her emotional life. While she may find various aspects of him absolutely befuddling–particularly his belief in love and his religious faith–it’s still clear how much she respects and loves him, even though she would never say so outright.
For Joel, Sam is a bit of a guiding light. While it’s clear that he’s managed to forge his own form of happiness within the straight confines of Manhattan, Kansas, Sam’s arrival back in town heralds a new period of his life. She pushes him in some productive directions, daring him to venture outside of his comfort zone. And, just as Sam respects Joel, he holds her in the highest regard. What starts as a bit of star-struck idol worship matures into something much more mature and, when Joel leaves the church out of guilt, Sam becomes one of the pillars he comes to lean on.
And, as so often in real life, they have their fair share of troubles, particularly as the second season goes on and it becomes clear that Joel is developing romantic feelings for another man. When Sam finds out that he’s been hiding the relationship, she moves to cut him out, and the two barely speak until Joel corners her during a lunch date with one of their mutual friends. Heartfelt and hurtful words are thrown around–particularly by Sam–who is angry and hurt that Joel wouldn’t tell her about such an important thing in his life. For his part, Joel says that he loves her but that he knows, as she does, too, that however much they might appreciate one another that they can’t be everything to each other, nor should they be.
The thing is that both of them are right. Joel should have told Sam about his burgeoning relationship but, as both Sam’s sister Tricia has also pointed out, and as Sam herself quietly acknowledges, she does have a tendency to create a set of rules that she expects others to follow. For her, this is a way of preventing pain or heartache, but it so often does the opposite, isolating her and engendering bone-deep sadness. Ultimately, the death of Sam’s music teacher Darlene, and the marriage of their mutual friend Fred, brings them back together. Things won’t be the same, as Sam says, but they’ll still find a way forward.
This, I think, is a remarkably mature take on the complexities of queer/straight friendships. Like the best dramedies, it doesn’t shy away from the pain that such closeness entails, even as it also doesn’t deny us the sublimely absurd antics that friends share with each other (the moment when they both develop food poisoning as a result of some deeply questionable food at a luncheon is a case in point). What makes Somebody Somewhere such a great show, though, is the fact that it doesn’t hinge on queer trauma. Instead, it goes out of its way to show the extent to which queer people are able to make lives, and homes, for themselves even in places, like Kansas, that are far from known for being queer havens.
Fred, the informal leader of this little queer enclave, goes out of his way to make sure that Sam–he affectionately refers to her as “Sammy”--is included in their little social circle. It’s clear that this is something of a strange (if welcome) experience for Sam who, as we’ve already seen, tends to distance herself from others so as to avoid the heartache that is always a risk when one opens oneself up to others. Slowly but surely, though, Sam becomes a key part of this family, so much so that Fred even asks her to sing at his wedding, even as she offers him the use of her father’s farm for the ceremony.
“Families aren’t easy,” he says to Sam. “Not even the fun ones.” There’s a profound truth to Fred’s statement, because it is true that families, whatever form they come in, whether chosen or biological, are, at bottom, human relationships, which means that they come with all sorts of complications. And, as Sam slowly realizes, this means that being part of a family–whether it’s with her sister Tricia or with Joel, Fred, and the rest of the queer gang–means being vulnerable enough to subject to heartache.
There’s a particularly raw sincerity about the moment when Sam and Joel finally make up, with each of them once again bringing their own unique character strengths to the table. In the end, they realize that they are better off together than they were apart. It still remains unclear to what extent Sam is actually okay with the idea of Joel having someone else in his life, but at the very least she is willing to give it a try. If nothing else, she’s going to try to have a fling with her hot nextdoor neighbor.
Somebody Somewhere has, from the beginning, shown itself to be one of the best shows on television. While its stakes may not seem as high as those in, say, House of the Dragon or Succession, for Sam and Joel, and for those of us invested in their friendship, they certainly feel that way. It’s not afraid to get into the poignant messiness of friendship, I can only hope that we get at least one more season in which to see Joel and Sam navigate the uncertain waters that lie ahead.