When I reach for a contemporary Kansas-feeling show, my mind goes first to Apple TV’s Ted Lasso. Set in London, the most Kansas part of the show is the mention of Wichita State University and their fictitious football team, which Ted (Kansas City’s own Jason Sudekis) coached before taking over AFC Richmond, a fictitious soccer team across the pond. To make sure audiences understand Ted is straight out of the nation’s heartland, Sudekis adopts a twangy dialect more commonplace in the south than anywhere in the state I call home.
Enter Bridget Everett and the HBO series Somebody Somewhere. Born and raised in Manhattan, Kansas, Everett relocated in the late 1990s to Manhattan, New York, where she is best known for her raunchy bare-all cabaret acts. Now in her late 40s and with the star power to lead a show of her own, Somebody Somewhere asks: What happens if Everett never left Kansas?
Billed as a “coming-of-middle-age” story, each of the season’s seven half-hour episodes focuses on Sam Miller (Everett) and the small inroads she makes toward a sense of belonging in a town she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back to. After a decade spent bartending in Lawrence, she returned to Manhattan to care for her sick sister Holly. Now six months removed from Holly’s death, Sam still finds herself in her hometown, paralyzed by grief and unable to leave her parents, Ed (the late Mike Hagerty) and M.J. (Jane Brody), and living sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison).
Sam’s house-bounding grief is no match for Joel (Jeff Hiller), a former classmate who works alongside her in a dreary standardized testing center. Joel better remembers Sam as a standout from their high school show choir days and makes it his mission to get Sam back into singing. With his extroverted encouragement, Sam joins a clandestine performance group known as “Choir Practice” — hosted late-night in the town’s mall church and home to Manhattan’s queer community — and finds a path back to herself (and her singing voice) again.
It feels like Everett made this show as much for Kansans as for herself. She joined producers Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, both proud Midwesterners (from Illinois and Minnesota, respectively), in the writer’s room. I get the sense HBO said, “Who in our ranks is from the Midwest?” and threw these three into a room together to make the quintessential Midwestern show. What they made is still revolutionary, and certainly more homehitting than Ted Lasso’s vaguely Midwest-ish niceties.
With Midwest voices crafting the narrative both on and off screen, the result is an accurate story that doesn’t treat Manhattan’s inhabitants as caricatures or the entire state as Conservative Flyover Country. The beauty of Somebody Somewhere is that it gives Kansans of all ages, beliefs and lifestyles permission to exist in nuanced ways against an authentic central Kansas backdrop of corn stalks and limestone buildings. Everett proves Kansans are not exempt from loneliness or heartbreak, even in the middle of a tornado warning.
The show’s visual landscape provides a scavenger hunt for Kansan viewers, adding a layer of specificity to the overarching themes of grief, homecoming and belonging. Real Kansas goods and places, like Kansas Earth and Sky candles, pepper B-roll footage and color in the background with regional loyalty. A bag of Guy’s Tasty Mix is in the foreground as Sam and her dad discuss what to do about this year’s crop harvest. Sam sips on a Boulevard Tank 7 during a backyard dinner, where it becomes obvious Sam’s mom is hiding a drinking problem. Tricia sports an Alma Creamery t-shirt as she sweeps up all the booze bottles their mom has hidden in the barn.
Somebody Somewhere texturizes its nonverbal storytelling with actual Kansas life. These snacks, drinks and T-shirts are the background terrain of our lives’ most intimate moments. They aren’t fake talismans of regionality like Ted Lasso’s JoeArthur Gatestack, an amalgamation of four different Kansas City BBQ restaurants. They are recognizable homegrown brands (though, as my husband pointed out in a recent re-watch, Tank 7 bottles aren’t yet twist-offs).
The irony that Everett had to leave the Little Apple for a career in the Big Apple to finally have the freedom to make a show set in Kansas is not lost on me. Somebody Somewhere is one of 23 total shows set in Kansas since the dawn of television. In the 2020s alone, there are already 20 shows set in New York City. I do wish there were room for native Kansas voices to have a seat at the table without first having to justify their performance chops in New York or Hollywood. Until that day comes, I am grateful for Everett’s voice having a presence on a premiere streaming platform — and for the promise of a second season.
