In Season 1 of HBO’s “Somebody Somewhere,” the spotlight had to find Sam (Bridget Everett), a wayward 40-something, looking for direction in her hometown of Manhattan, Kansas.
In the slice-of-life dramedy’s very first episode, Sam is reluctantly pulled on stage by her best friend Joel (Jeff Hiller) to perform karaoke and ends up astonishing the crowd as she belts Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush’s “Don’t Give Up.” She doesn’t like the vulnerability, but there’s no denying music is her form of expression.
So, it’s a full-circle moment in the series finale when Sam seizes the microphone to perform for her chosen family (with Joel again on the piano). “For me, she has grown about a thousand miles from where she was in Season 1,” Everett tells Variety. “For a viewer, it probably just seems minute, but our whole mission for Sam was to have her keep pushing herself. It’s always her instinct to retreat, but she’s pushing herself forward. It was beneficial for Bridget Everett, too, to watch that and to learn from it.”
As she commands the stage and gives one lucky friend a lap dance, Sam sings her heart out to Miley Cyrus’ “The Climb,” a soaring anthem well suited to the skyward perspective on life that Sam fought and forged over three seasons.
Everett used to close out her cabaret shows with the song, so she knows how to bring it home, and director Lennon Parham didn’t want to impede her from doing it. She had three cameras ready to capture every moment, and even some they didn’t expect, like when Everett climbs on a chair and spins the ceiling fan adorned with dollar bills.
“You don’t have that many opportunities to shoot it because she’s giving a thousand percent, and you don’t want to ask her to do that multiple times,” Parham says. “So really, it’s just about getting out of Bridget’s way and giving her the space, knowing that everything else is taken care of so she can fully go there.”
Everett has never met Cyrus, nor does she know if the superstar is even aware of their show. But whoever cleared the song on the show’s shoestring music budget will forever have Everett’s gratitude. “I told them the song that matters most is ‘The Climb,’ and that was one of the first songs that came back at the amount that we budgeted,” she says. “It was meant to be.”
The other defining song of the final season didn’t have to be cleared because Everett wrote it herself. In Episode 2, soft-spoken Brad (Tim Bagley) enlists Sam’s help to write and perform a surprise song for his boyfriend Joel during a dinner party. For the lyrics, Everett drew inspiration from Bagley’s stories of his late partner, Bill.
“I asked Tim what it was that they loved about each other, and he told me about a thousand things that he loved about Bill,” she says. “Then I said, ‘Well, what did he love about you?’ And he just said, ‘I don’t know, it’s just the way he looked at me.’ That is the most pure and beautiful thing, so that’s what I wanted to put in the song.”
Intimately shot on a very small set, director Robert Cohen says Sam fully steps into her own as the anchor of the moment. But it was Bagley who had every person in the scene and behind it sobbing. “It is the perfect encapsulation of ‘Somebody Somewhere’ because it’s just world-class talent, incredible writing and the emotion of a show in this tiny space that is just radiating and affecting everybody it touches.”
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