Big Tits, Trim Ankles, and a Peabody

Bridget Everett on the life and death of Somebody Somewhere: “I can’t imagine anything else being this good.”

Bridget Everett is sitting at her kitchen table on the Upper West Side, making tiny but crucial adjustments to the third-season finale of her acclaimed HBO series, Somebody Somewhere. She faces a gallery wall of art evoking her almost two decades of performing in NYC: a custom illustration of her band, the Tender Moments; a Cindy Sherman–esque portrait of Amy Sedaris that Sedaris herself gifted Everett; a large diaper painted gold, framed to commemorate some inside joke from a show she used to do at Joe’s Pub. To the side, a crate overflows with dog toys, the heap topped with a plushie martini glass. Those all belong to Lulu, a white powder puff of a Pomeranian who is nowhere to be found today. (She was sent to doggy boot camp for acting like a diva on set during her cameo stint in the season-three premiere.)

Everett’s laptop is her virtual editing bay, and she’s joined by three of her co-executive producers and editor Chris Donlon, whom she calls Dr. D. (“The doctor’s always in, getting it done.”) I’m watching Everett watch herself, blue eyes behind glasses studying the screen, where she’s playing Sam Miller, a character she’s put so much of herself into, whom showrunner Hannah Bos calls an “alternate reality” Bridget who never left Kansas. Everett pauses on one moment, dubbing it “TTC,” which is code for “touch too cutie.” Somebody Somewhere is often emotionally wrenching as it follows Sam, who moves back to her hometown of Manhattan, Kansas, grieving and feeling directionless, depressed, and unloveable. There she finds family, both the chosen, community-based kind and her own semi-estranged and complicated biological one, but Everett never wants to “force emotional gravitas. I just want everything to feel like real life, and simple, and try to avoid indicating too much.” Right now, she’s cutting down a scene where Sam talks about her late sister so it’s as far from mawkish as possible.

She applies the same approach minutes later while fine-tuning a scene in which Sam’s platonic soul mate Joel, played by Jeff Hiller, has a blowout case of the shits. “We just won a Peabody, so it’s about balance,” Everett says, laughing. She and the producers have a code for the bathroom, like they have a code for everything onscreen and off: 202s, as in Everett telling the others on the call, “If anybody needs to step away for 202s, don’t feel like you can’t share that information safely. Hopefully it won’t end up in the pages of Vulture.” There’s an egolessness to this show’s comedy, which bucks the trend of mega-high-concept TV series by depicting normal, recognizable people and the stupid, intimate humor that lives within them. They lose control of their bowels, they lose possession of their hearts; Everett is assiduous in perfecting either scenario.

Over the course of reporting this story, nearly everyone I spoke to choked up talking about either Everett or her series. “It’s been a real friendship, you know? A real family,” says Bos, her eyes welling. “There’s been so many real tears, watching characters you got to make with people doing things that were pretend. But we were having these real emotions.” That’s the pull of Somebody Somewhere, a show that’s as universal as it is semi-autobiographical to Everett and her co-writers’ lives. Some were farklempt because they were aware of the fact that, despite the ovation around the show, its primo Sunday-night slot, and the aforementioned Peabody, HBO announced it will not be moving forward with a fourth season. If you want the glass-half-empty take, call it another casualty of Hollywood constricting, developing fewer shows and renewing fewer old ones. But from glass-half-full, which is more aligned with the spirit of the show, Everett thinks it’s a miracle this little show made it to three seasons at all. “What I’m the most sad about is, will I ever get to work on something that’s as special again? I can’t imagine anything else being this good.”

No one who followed Everett’s career over the past two decades could have predicted this would be the show she‘d make when she finally got the opportunity — a coming-of-age story about discovering oneself in “the back half of one’s 40s,” as she puts it, set in the other Manhattan she once called home. In 2017, she made a pilot called Love You More with the “fabulous girl who can’t get her life together in the big city” formula that worked for so many of her contemporaries, but Amazon Prime Video declined to pick up a full season. Whispers of the sweetness and sensitivity of Somebody Somewhere are in the 34-minute episode, but while the pilot harnesses some of Everett’s energy as a live performer, HBO comedy chief Amy Gravitt says Sam is closer to who Everett is off stage.

Everett might’ve been new to headlining her own TV series, but in the camp-utopian fantasy world of New York Off and Off–Off Broadway in the 2000s and 2010s, she was basically Madonna. Everett studied opera in college and built a reputation as a full-throttle Valkyrie in Manhattan cabaret spaces; a vocal teacher back in the day described her having a voice “like a pack of wild horses.” Her performance style is as warm and intimate as it is audacious. She’ll lead into a song about anal sex with an anecdote about her mother, delivered with real tears in her eyes. She doesn’t just do crowdwork; she’ll single out an audience member, crawl offstage, caress them, then slow-dance while singing into their ear. Her former backing bandmate, Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys, remembers one performance where she did “one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen,” chugging a mixed drink of milk and Chardonnay. “It was so gross!” he laughs. 

Everett performs like she’s playing a game of truth or dare with herself and choosing both. In shows like her Obie-winning Rock Bottom and regular appearances at Joe’s Pub, she developed a repertoire of comedic, slutty, celebratory anthems like “Titties” and “What I Got to Do (to Get That Dick in My Mouth).” Carolyn Strauss, the legendary producer and former HBO exec responsible for the likes of The Sopranos, The Wire, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Six Feet Under, was introduced to Everett’s act by Sex and the City creator Michael Patrick King, “and I was totally blown away,” she tells me. “What struck me about her was, while her stage show was incredibly risqué, there was such a vulnerability underneath it, and a kindness. It was such a unique combination of things: that total honesty about who you are in the world, and the bawdiness of it. I’d never seen anything like it.”

HBO execs Amy Gravitt and Casey Bloys had also seen Everett’s live show years ago, and in 2015, they approached her about developing a TV series with them. “I was like, ‘No.’ And they were like, ‘Yes,’” Everett laughs. “I’m not Julia Roberts. I’m just some big tits with nice trim ankles, and nobody saw me as No. 1 on the call sheet. But HBO did.” Everett’s new show would be produced by Strauss and the Duplass brothers and showrun by fellow Midwesterners turned alternative downtown theater people Paul Thureen and Hannah Bos, who had written together on High Maintenance and Mozart in the Jungle. “We admired her from afar and were too nervous to be friends, but we were always sort of in awe of her,” Thureen tells me.

Thureen and Bos said they had never worked on a series like this, where the network encouraged the creative team to play things subtle and small and trust their instincts. “I think Bridget’s dealt a lot in the past with people being like, ‘loud!’ or ‘funny!’ or ‘faster!’ because she has been the comic relief in a lot of the stuff,” says Jay Duplass, who also directed the pilot. “When we were setting the tone, it was like, ‘Don’t feel the need to perform. I’m right here, I can see everything going on in your mind. You don’t have to show me anything.’” 

When I see Everett again in September at a lunch spot in her neighborhood, she’s wearing three necklaces, one for each season of the show: a round pendant with a big number one on it (for “No. 1 on the call sheet”), a golden toilet for season two (that season’s 202 will haunt me forever), and a “GAAO” nameplate given to her by Bos and Thureen for season three, the theme of which is “growth against all odds.” It also serves as a mantra for the show itself. With no big names or familiar IP, Somebody Somewhere ratings odds were stacked against it from the beginning. The production powered through a pandemic and the death of a cast member (Mike Hagerty, who played Sam’s dad) to get to season three, where its most essential characters are squaring who they are as individuals with who they are in (and out of) relationships. Joel is moving in with his boyfriend Brad (played by Tim Bagley and named after Everett’s brother, who has a man-crush on Joel). Sam is closer than ever with her recently divorced sister Tricia and taking baby steps toward maybe-kinda letting a crush bloom.

Then there’s Sam and Joel’s other bestie, the always delightful, ridiculously named Fred Rococo, played by legendary drag king Murray Hill. Somebody Somewhere has always been inherently political; it depicts small-town, conservative, rural life that isn’t often shown on TV but is so many Americans’ reality: one where queer people’s lives are not defined by antagonism. At a time when the GOP is attempting to ostracize trans people from all aspects of public life, having Murray Hill play an openly trans agriculture professor happily living his life in the middle of the middle of the country is moving and necessary. The show doesn’t shy away from depicting homophobia — in season one, Sam’s more conservative sister Tricia takes down a rainbow display in her shop when Sam teases that it could be misconstrued as endorsing Pride. This season, Joel (who has been taking a break from the house of the Lord) confronts his past trauma as gay man in Christian spaces, while his church-mouse boyfriend Brad begins to delicately scratch the surface of his own. But Somebody Somewhere depicts all of this with grace and nuance. “What I wanted to do was reflect what kind of people I would find if I still lived in Kansas. They exist there, and are thriving there, and have struggles there, and have love there,” Everett says. “I think the show’s coming out at the right time, because for some people, it feels like a hug. I know I would want to watch a show like this, because it’s such a terrifying time, and so emotionally fraught. I hope that people find their way to it as something to give them a little bit of comfort in the storm.”

Somebody Somewhere’s cast comprises many of Everett’s friends, old and new, and for all of them, this was the huge break performers at their age and stage in their careers don’t normally get. Everett credits Hill with giving her one of her first big performance slots in New York, and Hill remembers how they were introduced by a friend not long after Everett moved to the city in the early 2000s. “I have a big personality, but I’m short and chubby. Bridget’s about eight feet taller than me. So I looked up at her, and I was like, ‘What are you doin’ Saturday night? Wanna be in my show?’” She arrived at Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction that Saturday with one of those big plaid shopping bags as a purse, ready to perform in a corset, panties, and heels. “My fans went nuts for her. It was like shock and awe.” They’ve been dear friends and collaborators ever since.

“We all got this opportunity later in life, and later in our careers,” Hill says. “We had been slugging in improv clubs, comedy clubs, nightclubs, touring, live-gig culture. There was a mutual feeling of ‘a dream is coming true.’ We can’t fucking believe it because we’re all a little self-loathing.” 

Improv all-star Jeff Hiller, who so convincingly plays Sam’s platonic soul mate on the series, was an acquaintance of Everett when he auditioned for the pilot and started crying when he read the script. “I was so shocked at how subtle it was, so nuanced and authentic. You don’t get to see that when it’s not famous people playing it.” Everett’s former roommate Mary Catherine Garrison had given up acting and was living in Virginia, doing school runs, when Everett texted her asking to audition for the role of Tricia. “I said, ‘What’s it called?’ And she said, ‘Somebody Somewhere,’ and tears immediately came to my eyes. There’s something so deep and pure in her, and that’s never changed.”

Everett and I meet for lunch around a week after HBO announced it would not renew Somebody Somewhere for a fourth season. I ask about how it broke the news to her, and her answer is diplomatic. “My brain doesn’t really clock all that stuff.” It doesn’t feel over to her yet, she says, because there’s still a whole season that’s yet to come out, which means seven more weeks of the characters living and out in the world. Plus, even a cancellation isn’t really the end of Sam. “I would never want to button up the story. Their lives go on, they live in my head. I know what they would be doing now, and maybe one day we’ll get to explore that in a movie, or a Broadway musical — that’s actually not a bad idea.” And there’s still time for it to blow up on Max this season. “Maybe we’ll get our Schitt’s Creek moment. You never know.”

Leaving the TV production cycle allows Everett to get back in touch with the side of her who sings about “beavertail titties” (“Put ’em up!”) festooned in full glam. On October 24, she returned to live performance at the biggest room she’s ever headlined, playing the Beacon (“it’s a great commute”) with her band, the Tender Moments. “It’s important not just for me, but for the guys in the band, for us to get to do bigger things. I hope that one day we get to play Madison Square Garden, and then I’ll be happy.” 

When I suggest she’s the “mother” to New York’s contemporary cabaret scene, or ask her to speak about her influence on downtown musical comedy, she shrugs it off in true midwestern fashion, deferring instead to acts that inspired her, like Kiki & Herb. Still, her career has come beautifully full circle over the past decade, as her style of performance hits new levels of mainstream success. Just think: When Everett takes the stage at the Beacon that night, just a 14-minute subway ride away, Cole Escola will be performing their camp Mary Todd Lincoln spoof Oh, Mary! to a sold-out crowd on Broadway. Exactly ten years and one week before, they had a small role in Rock Bottom playing Everett’s aborted fetus. If that’s not the miracle of life, I don’t know what is.

Everett’s also currently developing a stage show with her longtime friend and occasional duet partner Patti LuPone. They’re still in early stages, working with the all-star writing team of Jason Eagan and Teddy Bergman and director Scott Wittman, with original music from Marc Shaiman, but whatever it is, it’ll certainly be a diva-off. “I think she’s a wee bit shy. When you see her onstage, you would imagine someone that was always ready with a raunchy quip or off-color remark, so I appreciate her fearlessness onstage,” LuPone says, calling in from her dressing room before a matinee performance of The Roommate. The first time she saw Everett perform, it was like witnessing an “Amazonian goddess with a voice that was extraordinary. She’s a force. And she doesn’t adhere to the mainstream. A lot of people in that position are not celebrated the way they should be.” LuPone says she could tear up thinking about a scene in season two of Somebody Somewhere when Sam’s vocal coach lays a hand on her heart during a breathing exercise. “And the fact that the Emmys and the Golden Globes ignore that show, but she gets a Peabody? At least somebody knows what they’re doing.”

Beyond the show, Everett recently filmed a small part in a movie, “and that was a very lovely, warm experience. I hadn’t done it in five years, so I was a little rusty, but they were very patient with me.” She’s in the early stages of writing a book, centered around her borrowed–from–LL Cool J motto, “DDHD: Dreams don’t have deadlines.” For someone who took so naturally to television, wowing the industry vets who worked with her and beating the odds to get such an unlikely series made for three brilliant seasons, maybe Everett has too good of an attitude, too grounded a disposition and humane approach to filming, to rush into something new or create a media empire. “I’m not usually driven to go out and find what’s next. I usually let it sort of emerge on the street. We find each other, opportunity and me.” For now, there’s still a whole new season to promote. An ending and a beginning at the same time, for a show that grew against all odds. “It’s like everything in life, a punch and a kiss.”