Everett is a cabaret singer who plays a woman who almost never sings. The holding back is her gift, and in Somebody Somewhere it makes for one of the truest portraits on television of a woman in her forties who has stopped expecting much.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Sam Miller in a parked car. She and Joel (Jeff Hiller) are going nowhere, talking over each other about nothing, and Bridget Everett does the thing she does best: she gets the joke about herself in before anyone else can reach it. She is a cabaret singer with a big voice, and across a season of Somebody Somewhere (2022) she uses it perhaps three times. The rest of the time she plays a woman in her forties who has decided nothing much is going to happen to her, filmed as she is, in flat Kansas light, from the kitchen doorway. That is the performance. Everything else is waiting.
It took a long time to arrive. Everett studied vocal performance, moved to New York in 1997 and waited tables for a quarter of a century while building a cabaret act from 2007, including At Least It's Pink, co-written with Michael Patrick King. The stage persona was loud, rude and anatomical, with songs about bodies and a band called The Tender Moments. Screen work came in bits: Sex and the City (2008), Kat in Trainwreck (2015). Patti Cake$ (2017), in which she played Barb, the young rapper's drinking mother, was the first film part to ask her for something other than noise, and critics noticed the weight she gave it. Then came Somebody Somewhere, set in Manhattan, Kansas, where she grew up, with Everett leading, writing and producing, and three seasons of seven episodes to do it in.
What she does there is hold back, and it is harder than it looks. Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen wrote the series to her measure, and Hiller, who is her equal, gives her someone to be quiet with. Jay Duplass, Robert Cohen and Lennon Parham direct in long takes and let a joke sit through the awkward second afterwards, which is where Everett lives. The first time Sam sings properly, we were not ready for it. The series had kept her mouth shut for so long that the voice arrived like news about someone we thought we knew, and we found ourselves moved by a woman singing in a bar, which we had assumed we were past.
The caveats are the ones we attached to the series. It is slow, small and short, and there is no plot to speak of; anyone who wants things to happen will be waiting. And we have seen Everett do this at length exactly once. The film parts are supporting parts, and the series that was built around her has finished. "Woman meets man, falls in love, changes and grows," she said in 2022. "That's not my life experience." Somebody should hand her a film built on the same principle, and a director willing to shoot her from the doorway.
Biography
Bridget Everett is an American comedian, actress, singer, writer and cabaret performer. Born on 21 April 1972 in Manhattan, Kansas, she studied vocal performance at Arizona State University before moving to New York in 1997, where she worked as a waitress while developing her stage career.
She gained attention for her bawdy cabaret performances and co-wrote the Off-Broadway show At Least It's Pink (2007). Everett has appeared in films including Sex and the City (2008), Trainwreck (2015), Patti Cake$ (2017) and Little Evil (2017), as well as series such as 2 Broke Girls (2011) and Unbelievable (2019).
She stars as Sam Miller, writes episodes and serves as executive producer on the HBO series Somebody Somewhere (2022–2024), set in her hometown. For the series she received a Television Critics Association Award for Individual Achievement in Comedy and a Peabody Award, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award.
