Not every epic hero has to travel from Troy to Ithaca, across Middle-earth or Westeros, or along the Yellow Brick Road to battle monsters, forge unlikely friendships, discover hidden powers and vanquish the shadow that threatens to engulf their world.
Sometimes, as Dorothy Gale discovered all those years ago, a hero can do all that without ever leaving Kansas.
In “Somebody Somewhere,” Sam Miller — another woman who understands the importance of a really big song — does it without even getting a hallucination-inducing knock on the head.
For Emmy purposes, the HBO series, which ended Sunday after three seasons, is considered a comedy. And certainly the half-hour show, created by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen and starring the bawdy comedian/cabaret star Bridget Everett as Sam, can be funny as hell. But like many modern comedies, most recently and famously “The Bear,” “Somebody Somewhere” is equally driven by pathos.
Indeed, the series shares certain themes with “The Bear”: the devastation of parental alcoholism, the twisted relationship between talent and self-doubt. (In this part of the Midwest, though, ambitions are smaller, clashes far less operatic. Here, kitchens have toaster ovens, rooster figurines and refrigerator magnets.)
It’s an even farther cry from TV’s more obvious epic journey tales — no warring clans, no Dire wolves or vows of vengeance, no magical rings. Unless you count the near-omnipresence of doughnuts.
But don’t let the lack of florid monologues, raging battle scenes or jaw-dropping vistas fool you: The characters of “Somebody Somewhere” may look and act like people you might pass at your local Walmart but they are as dazzling and complicated as any wizard, warrior or heart-warming Scarecrow, their journey as fraught with pitfalls as any trek through Mordor, Westeros or Oz.
When we meet Sam, she is mired in grief and teetering on the brink of surrender. She only returned to her small hometown of Manhattan, Kan., to nurse her older sister Holly, who had cancer. Now Holly is dead and Sam is trapped. In mourning, in a job she hates, in the toxic interplay of her dysfunctional family, in the internal hamster wheel of judgment and self-loathing. She doesn’t want to be where she is, but she cannot summon the fortitude to leave.
Not that she has anywhere special to go. Despite having big dreams as a high school show choir star, Sam never made it farther than nearby Lawrence, Kan. Where, as her offensively defensive younger sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison) likes to remind her, she worked as a bartender.
Compared with Tricia, who is married with kids and co-owner of a local pillows ‘n’ things boutique, or their farmer parents, Sam is not even the hero of her own story.
Enter Joel (Jeff Hiller), a gangly co-worker who, as it turns out, was also in show choir. Preternaturally sweet, and just the right amount of salty, Joel is unabashedly thrilled to reconnect with Sam, whom he always considered a star. An earnest, active member of his church (which is located in “the mall”), Joel invites Sam to his secret “choir practice.” Reluctantly, she shows up, only to find a warm and welcoming gathering of the town’s queer and otherwise free spirits engaged in a festive evening of music and drinking.
Overseen by the benevolent sage Fred Rococo (drag king Murray Hill), “choir practice” isn’t exactly Oz or Rivendell, but it serves the same function. Sam glimpses the joy and nobility of comradeship and thus begins her quest to save, if not the entire world, then her personal piece of it.
It is a journey beset by perils: Though the road Sam travels cleaves mostly through fields of corn and the weary charm of a small-town Main Street, here, as everywhere, there be dragons.
Her mother, Mary Jo (Jane Drake Brody), is an alcoholic who later has a stroke that sparks violent behavior, requiring long-term hospitalization. Her father, Ed (Mike Hagerty), is a classic long-suffering, co-dependent spouse, struggling to manage the farm despite his wife’s illness and his own age, physical limitations and general exhaustion. Tricia, long jealous of Sam’s relationship with Holly, has built around her life a brittle exterior that inevitably shatters. Even the happy-go-lucky Joel has demons of doubt and past trauma.
But the most fearsome obstacle Sam faces is, of course, herself. Like most classic heroes, she possesses a superpower, her voice. And also like many of them, she is reluctant to use it.
Jeff Hiller in “Somebody Somewhere.”
(Sandy Morris / HBO)
Encouraged by Joel and Fred to begin singing again, Sam struggles to own her artistry because it will require her, as all artistry does, to tap into the teeming well of emotion over which she has tightly fitted a lid of anger and indifference.
Every song she sings in the course of three seasons is a summit gained — only to find the path forward blocked by fallen rocks or frightening specters of her own making. (Everett is an accomplished, polished singer, and her ability to give Sam both a powerful sound and the ragged edge of a hesitant, untrained voice is a feat of musical acting.)
The show itself pulls off a similar feat. Deceptively mundane, authentically scatalogical and granular rather than sweeping, “Somebody Somewhere” cloaks its themes of courage, commitment and daring in baggy T-shirts and moments mined from small-town life — a scene in which Sam encourages Joel to pass a tractor hauling a load of hay will resonate with anyone who has driven a rural road. Hard decisions must be made, about the fate of the farm and Mary Jo, and there is a tornado in one episode. It is Kansas, after all. But the true maelstroms are far more human. The difficulty of asking for, and accepting, help; the slip-sliding task of scaling emotional walls; the acceptance of all kinds of loss.
Like all great epics, “Somebody Somewhere” has many heroes. Sam may be the central character, but the fellowship that grows around her is both unique and deeply familiar.
In dragging Sam toward her destiny, Joel can seem like the Scarecrow, Samwise and Podrick Payne rolled into one, but as a gay Christian in need of a church community and a people pleaser hoping for a healthy romantic relationship, Joel has his own monsters to slay.
Tricia, trapped in the pretty-princess, mind-your-language prison she helped build, must accept the magical talisman life presents her — the “Lying C—” pillow she created after discovering that her best friend/business partner was sleeping with Tricia’s husband — before discovering that what seems like failure is simply an exit ramp to success.
As for Fred Rococo, well, there has never been a sage/wizard/sybil as engaging as he. A professor of agriculture at Kansas State, Fred is a trans man who understands the dangers of isolation and is never too busy to ask “How are you feeling?” or offer nonjudgmental advice on everything from crop rotation to matters of the heart. He is the captain of the party bus, the lord of the tornado-shelter rec room, the orderer of “French toast for the table.”
When, at the end of the second season, he gets married, it is impossible not to weep. Not just because a desire to please Fred forces Sam to sing “Ave Maria” and Joel to deliver an impossibly touching speech, but also because Fred deserves to be the happiest man in the world.
Love of all kinds — romantic, platonic, familial, topophilic — fuels every epic adventure, and “Somebody Somewhere” is all about love, its necessity and its pitfalls. In Season 2, Sam rejects her friendship with Joel, and her growing reconnection with Tricia, over what she believes are betrayals. (Joel has begun dating Brad, played by the wonderful Tim Bagley, without telling her; Tricia reveals that Holly told her she was sick a year before she told Sam.) In both cases, the omissions were made in fear of how Sam would react.
“This is what you do,” Tricia says when Sam walks out on her. “When you get mad, when you get upset, when someone has made a tiny mistake. You cut them out.”
That is the dark forest through which Sam walks. Her belief that she is unlovable forces her constantly to scan for subtext, proof that she cannot trust anyone, that actions of caring or community are only an illusion, tricking her into believing, momentarily, she does not have to be alone.
Love can only triumph when we learn how to forgive, beginning with ourselves, which is the epic journey most of us face at one time or another. Fred’s wedding is the impetus for Sam to put aside her anger at Joel and Tricia, and in Season 3, she begins to accept that the forest is not as dark or full of terrors as it seems. Love, even romantic love (with the burly Icelandic man who is now renting the Miller farm), becomes possible as Sam recognizes that the way out is forward.
“Somebody Somewhere” doesn’t end with a benevolent monarch returned to the throne, the forces of evil destroyed or Sam making her Broadway debut while Iceland beams at her from the wings. It ends in a dive bar with Sam surrounded by friends as she sings. OK, Iceland does a little beaming, but the song? It’s not “Over the Rainbow.” It’s Miley Cyrus’ “The Climb.”
Because no epic is ever about the resolution — it’s all about the journey.
