'Somebody Somewhere' Shows That You're Never Too Old To Grow

While watching Somebody Somewhere’s third season (streaming on Max with new episodes every Sunday), a careworn and even trite sentiment came to mind: “adulting is hard.” It’s one of those aphorisms that are quite true (adult responsibility sucks) while feeling a bit grating to hear. There’s a childishness to the phrase, but it’s apt in how working through the imperatives of adult life can make one feel or act like a child. Throughout the season so far, viewers have seen Sam (Bridget Everett) and Joel (Jeff Hiller) working through the mundane but no less resonant challenges of life. For Joel, it’s the start of a serious relationship that challenges him to maintain his own identity as he becomes part of a unit with Brad (Tim Bagley) and for Sam, it’s the uphill climb of taking care of herself, a hard thing to do when she’s stayed away from the doctor’s for so long.

When the church ladies gifted Joel and Brad a bunch of rainbow gear to celebrate the couple moving in together, I winced. The “I Love My Two Dads” mugs especially jumped out at me. It’s not that the gifts were wrong or inappropriate, it’s that I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of well-meaning gift before. The logic the church ladies appeared to be operating on was: gay = rainbows, so gifts for a gay person must be rainbow. Brad loved them, but Joel seemed to be suppressing an eye-roll. In fact, this season, it looked like Joel was suppressing a lot. It’s unspoken but implied that this is Joel’s first experience cohabitating with a partner, and this goes a long way to explain the growing pains he’s experiencing. Joel expressed frustration about having to “share everything” with Brad and seeing as how Joel left some personal things behind when he moved in with Brad, it seemed like Joel was following into a classic trap of relationships: minimizing yourself to fit into your partner’s life.

Because Somebody Somewhere is beautifully subtle, we’re merely shown the differences in character between Brad and Joel. Brad is older and grew up in a time when his queerness was far less acceptable to the people around him while Joel, in his words, “could never hide it.” They connect on things like their shared faith, but they’re meaningfully different in their tastes and friends. When Joel goes to a men’s Bible study group with Brad, Joel feels somewhat alienated, like he’s an ill-fit for Brad’s scene. A less humanist show might imply Brad was somehow wrong for playing straight in his past, but Somebody Somewhere knows that queers of all generations did what they had to do to get by. I think a lesser show might have also drawn out the tension of Joel minimizing himself for Brad until it was a climactic fight or break-up. Instead, Joel gently but firmly tells Brad what he needs. He wants to see his friends more often, he wants to load the dishwasher his way, and he wants some pictures on the fridge. Brad obliges, and Somebody Somewhere continues to serve some of the best queer representation on TV right now.

Sam’s struggle is one many people can relate to: taking care of herself. When her sister Tricia notices Sam flinching from pain in her knee, she lovingly browbeats Sam into getting it looked at. Sam’s reservations are understandable; she thinks of Holly’s terminal diagnosis when she thinks of the doctor’s office, but there are some other indignities that peek out. Sam is put in a medical gown that barely covers her breasts and as the doctor checks in on her lifestyle habits, you can see a sort of guilt wash over Sam. Going to the doctor and to the dentist are things we have to do to take care of our bodies, but there’s a shame that can stain the experience. Hearing that you haven’t been the best steward of your own body can feel embarrassing, like it’s a referendum on someone as a person. This is compounded by a truly asshole move from Fred’s wife Susan. Susan is getting Fred to exercise and eat right, so when Sam brings donuts to baseball practice, she tells Sam that she can live how she wants, but she can’t “bring Fred down” with her. This obviously gets to Sam.

Sam is someone who takes care of the others in her life. She supports Tricia in times thick and thin, she holds space for Joel and encourages him to take up space in his relationship, and she not only wrote a beautiful song with Brad, she helped him sing it as a way to express his love for Joel. Sam seems to have poured herself into caring for others, with her sister Holly as perhaps the biggest example. This season, Somebody Somewhere appears to ask if Sam was hiding behind that care. Don’t get me wrong, Sam moving in with Holly to help her through cancer is a beautiful act of love, but it seems like Sam uses this focus on others to ignore herself. Facing the physical debt (the blood sugar, the liver enzymes, the cholesterol) is hard and scary. Sam isn’t apt to be easy on herself and she could have shrunk away from a change. Instead, she’s doing a Billy Banks workout and crushing it.

What I most love about this season of Somebody Somewhere is how it recognizes this kind of personal growth as a timeless labor. There’s a tendency in media to portray this kind of growth as something that begins in youth and ends in adulthood, but is here with a reminder that growth can happen at any stage of life and that development of the self is a lifelong labor. It doesn’t matter if you’re 20 or 40 or 80; being who you want and living the life you want to live has no shelf life.