![]() The show even manages to handle my state’s love-hate relationship with The Wizard of Oz, referenced both in overarching theme and tongue-in-cheek plot points, without offense. The main character, Sam, works, eats, shops and sleeps in Manhattan – which, with a population of 50,000, is not small by Kansas standards – and makes a short drive to visit her folks’ struggling farm. The braless, heavy-set grocery shopper in Walmart sweats is there, too – not as the butt of a joke but as the talented, compelling star of the show.įorgoing the caricature of rurality as frighteningly remote and disconnected, Somebody Somewhere also nails the liminality of town and country, for many. Together they give us not just uber-cred detail but regional and rural ubiquities: the Ford Ranger pickup, the small gift shop selling potpourri, the amiable neighbor dealing fentanyl, the antique milk churn on a patio, the dangerous grain bin. Star and executive producer Bridget Everett is from Manhattan, Kansas, while creators Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen are both from the midwest. But those steering the show know firsthand the town and region they depict. Landscape shots thus feature corn fields rather than Kansas’s more common export, wheat. There’s a candle poured by that company in Ellinwood! A bag of chips from the Kansas City snack factory! The local craft beer, the local-dive T-shirt, the real-life storefronts – on the same TV screen at which we have spent a lifetime groaning when “Kansas” has mountains on the horizon.Īs it happens, Somebody Somewhere, the first season finale of which aired last Sunday, was filmed outside Chicago. It is in its authentic set design, over which Kansans I know have pointed and exclaimed with glee. The exquisite accuracy of the show – shocking and even moving to a resident of a region more often misrepresented, lampooned or altogether ignored in popular culture – is not just in its unceremonious diversity. I suspect that, offscreen, the latter’s browser history contained tutorials on how to refinish an old bathtub. The second episode includes a brunch scene at The Chef involving a biracial gay couple, a transgender agriculture professor wearing purple and a farm girl who returned home. Yet here we were, that sunny Saturday, living amid a richness omitted by prevailing narratives: the Spanish-named woman whom I paid for the tub, the server who refuted gender norms while working for tuition money, hunters with deer blood on their pants, my leftist-carpenter husband, and this farm girl who had returned home following professional stints in major cities.Ī few months later, I watched the HBO show Somebody Somewhere, improbably set in Manhattan, Kansas. I have been a journalist for 20 years and have never once, to my knowledge, worked with another journalist who had direct experience of rural life or agricultural labor, not to mention economic poverty in any setting. Perhaps that is because most of those employed as storytellers or gatekeepers in film, television or the national media industry have led urban lives geographically removed from regions condescendingly known as “flyover country”. Unfashionable places such as Kansas – “one of the square ones in the middle”, coastal acquaintances have said to me with a smile and a shrug – are often portrayed by Hollywood and news headlines as a homogeneous expanse of “uneducated”, white, straight, cis-gendered conservatives who are cooking meth or terrorizing outsiders. Then the server, who was wearing facial hair, makeup, men’s shoes, pearls and a crop top, refilled their coffee cups. When we left, I handed my blanket to a trio of men eating bacon and wearing hunting gear.
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