‘Somebody Somewhere’ Finale: HBO Series Was Epic TV

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, form unlikely friendships, discover hidden powers, and defeat the shadow that threatens to consume 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 meaning of a truly great song—does this without receiving a hallucinatory blow to 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 bawdy comedian/cabaret artist Bridget Everett, can be funny as hell. But like many modern comedies, most recently “The Bear,” “Somebody Somewhere” is equally characterized by pathos.

In fact, the series shares certain themes with The Bear: the devastating effects of parental alcoholism, the twisted relationship between talent and self-doubt. (In this part of the Midwest, however, the ambitions are lower and the collisions far less operational. Here, kitchens have toaster ovens, rooster figurines, and refrigerator magnets.)

It’s even further removed from the more obvious epic travel stories on TV – no feuding clans, no direwolves or vows of revenge, no magic rings. Unless you count the near-ubiquity of donuts.

But don’t let the lack of snappy monologues, furious fight scenes, or breathtaking vistas fool you: The characters in “Somebody Somewhere” may look and act like people you meet at your local Walmart, but they are exactly the same stunning and complicated as every wizard, warrior or heartwarming scarecrow, whose journey is as full of pitfalls as any trek through Mordor, Westeros or Oz.

When we meet Sam, she is in grief and on the verge of surrender. She only returned to her small hometown of Manhattan, Kansas, to care for her older sister Holly, who was suffering from cancer. Now Holly is dead and Sam is trapped. In grief, in a job she hates, in the toxic interaction of her dysfunctional family, in the inner hamster wheel of judgment and self-hatred. She doesn’t want to be where she is, but she can’t muster the courage to leave.

Not that she had anywhere in particular to go. Although Sam had big dreams as a high school show choir star, she never made it further than nearby Lawrence, Kansas. There, as her offensively defensive younger sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison) likes to remind her, she worked as a bartender.

Compared to Tricia, who is married with children and co-owner of a local pillow boutique, or to her farmer parents, Sam isn’t even the heroine of her own story.

Enter Joel (Jeff Hiller), a lanky colleague who, it turns out, was also in the show choir. Preternaturally sweet and just the right amount of salty, Joel is thrilled to be reunited with Sam, who he always thought was a star. A serious, active member of his church (located in the “mall”), Joel invites Sam to his secret “choir practice.” She hesitantly shows up to find a warm and welcoming meeting of the city’s queer and otherwise free spirits, spending a festive evening with music and drinking.

Led by benevolent sage Fred Rococo (Drag King Murray Hill), the “choir rehearsal” doesn’t exactly resemble Oz or Rivendell, but it serves the same function. Sam sees the joy and nobility of companionship and begins her quest to save, if not the entire world, at least her personal piece of it.

It’s a journey fraught with danger: although the road Sam travels is mostly through cornfields and the dreary charm of a small-town main street, there are dragons here, like everywhere else.

Her mother, Mary Jo (Jane Drake Brody), is an alcoholic who later suffers a stroke that leads to violent behavior and requires long-term hospitalization. Her father, Ed (Mike Hagerty), is a classic long-suffering codependent spouse who struggles to manage the farm despite his wife’s illness and his own age, physical limitations and general exhaustion. Tricia, who has long been jealous of Sam’s relationship with Holly, has built a fragile exterior around her life that inevitably falls apart. Even the cheerful Joel has demons of doubt and past trauma.

But the most fearsome obstacle Sam faces is, of course, herself. Like most classic heroes, she has one superpower: her voice. And like many of them, she’s hesitant to use it.

Jeff Hiller in “Somebody Somewhere.”

(Sandy Morris/HBO)

Encouraged by Joel and Fred to take up singing again, Sam finds it difficult to master her artistry because, like all art, it requires tapping into the seething well of emotion over which she keeps a tight lid of anger and anger indifference.

Every song she sings over the course of three seasons is a triumph – only to find that the path forward is blocked by fallen rocks or terrifying specters of her own creation. (Everett is an accomplished, polished singer, and her ability to give Sam both a powerful tone and the harsh edge of a hesitant, untrained voice is a tour de force of musical acting.)

The show itself accomplishes a similar feat. “Somebody Somewhere” is deceptively banal, authentically scatalogic and granular rather than sweeping, wrapping its themes of courage, commitment and daring in baggy T-shirts and moments from small-town life – a scene in which Sam encourages Joel to pass a tractor that transporting him A load of hay will resonate with anyone who has driven a country road. Difficult decisions must be made about the fate of the farm and Mary Jo, and in one episode a tornado occurs. It is Kansas after all. But the real whirlpools are far more human. The difficulty of asking for and accepting help; the slippery task of climbing emotional walls; the acceptance of all types of losses.

Like all great epics, “Somebody Somewhere” has many heroes. Sam may be the main character, but the community that grows around her is both unique and deeply familiar.

By dragging Sam into her fate, Joel can seem like the Scarecrow, Samwise, and Podrick Payne all 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 slain.

Tricia, trapped in the beautiful princess prison she helped build and in which she has mastered her language, must accept the magical talisman that life gives her – the “Lying C” pillow that she created after she finds out that her best friend/business partner has been sleeping with Tricia’s husband – before discovering that what seems like failure is merely an exit ramp to success.

As for Fred Rococo, there has never been a sage/wizard/Sybil as engaging as him. As a professor of agriculture at Kansas State University, Fred is a trans man who knows the dangers of isolation and is never too busy to ask, “How are you?” or offer unbiased advice on everything from crop rotation to matters of the heart. He is the captain of the party bus, the master of the lounge in the tornado shelter, the orderer of “French toast for the table.”

When he gets married at the end of season two, it’s impossible not to cry. Not only because the desire to please Fred compels Sam to sing “Ave Maria” and Joel to give an incredibly 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, which she believes has committed treason. (Joel started 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 out of fear of Sam’s reaction.

“That’s what you do,” Tricia says as Sam leaves her. “When you get angry, when you get upset, when someone has made a small mistake. You cut them out.”

This is the dark forest that Sam walks through. Her belief that she is unlovable forces her to constantly look for subtext, proof that she can’t trust anyone, that caring or communal actions are just an illusion, leading her to believe for a moment that she doesn’t have to be alone.

Love can only triumph when we learn to forgive, starting with ourselves, which is the epic journey most of us face every now and then. Fred’s wedding is the impetus for Sam to put aside her anger towards Joel and Tricia, and in Season 3 she begins to accept that the forest is not as dark and full of horrors as it seems. Love, even romantic love (with the burly Icelandic man now renting the Miller farm), becomes possible when Sam realizes the way out lies in the future.

“Somebody Somewhere” doesn’t end with a benevolent monarch returning to the throne, the forces of evil being destroyed, or Sam making her Broadway debut with Iceland beaming at her from the wings. It ends in a bar where Sam is singing, surrounded by friends. Okay, Iceland shines a little, but the song? It’s not “Over the Rainbow.” It’s “The Climb” by Miley Cyrus.

Because no epic is about the solution, but about the journey.