

Plans were made to resume shooting in September, but as case numbers rose, the producers pushed production again.
Bridget everett shows her softer somebody series#
Bos and Thureen wrote the script, interpolating some of Everett’s real experiences and a few verbatim quotes.īut isn’t the show supposed to be a comedy? “In our mind, we are making a drama that happens to be funny,” he said.Ī seven-episode series was greenlit early in 2020, then paused when the pandemic began. Everett and Jay Duplass, a director and executive producer on the show, took a research trip to Manhattan, Kan., so Duplass could meet her family, walk its not-so-mean streets and soak up what Everett suggested were its passive-aggressive vibes. “We didn’t want to do a snarky show,” Everett said. The show’s bittersweet message is that it’s never too late to find yourself, whenever and wherever you are. The second one is arguably Sam’s, though its comedy of chosen family is tinged with heartbreak. That first story is more or less Everett’s, though it took decades of restaurant work and a lot of sozzled karaoke nights before she had anything that could be called a career. There are plenty more about big-city transplants finding happiness only when they return home. There are plenty of stories about small-town kids who come to the city with a dollar and a dream, and make good. “They threw in the dead sister, and I was sold,” Everett said. With this prompt, Bos and Thureen, writing partners who have worked on “High Maintenance” and “Mozart in the Jungle,” pitched a show that drew on Everett’s real life - Kansas upbringing, unholy pipes, a mother who drinks, a sister who died young - and then imagined how this woman might express herself in a place that didn’t seem to welcome her heart or her gifts. Sam sits on the couch a lot in her underwear. She has a soul-eating job at an educational testing center and various family obligations - a father (Mike Hagerty) with a struggling farm, a mother (Jane Brody) with addiction issues, and a sister (Mary Catherine Garrison) with a wobbly marriage and an Instagrammable approach to evangelical Christianity. After years of bartending in a big city, Sam has returned to her hometown. (Not very close, as it turns out, though Everett said that the sides were delicious.) She was joined by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, the creators of “Somebody Somewhere,” a wistful Kansas-set half-hour comedy that arrives Sunday on HBO.Įverett, 49, stars as Sam, a woman whose biography parallels her own, to a point. This was on a Monday afternoon in mid-December at John Brown BBQ, a purveyor of Kansas City-style barbecue in Queens, which is to say the closest that a person can get to Kansas within the New York City limits.

“I would probably work in a restaurant and have two D.U.I.s and sit on the couch a lot in my underwear.” “I’d probably live in Kansas City, or Lawrence,” she said. Sometimes Bridget Everett, the actress, comedian and self-proclaimed “cabaret wildebeest,” wonders what would have happened if she had never left Kansas.
