Hannah Bos and her writing partner Paul Thureen have so far made one series, a small comedy about a woman who has decided nothing much will happen to her. Somebody Somewhere is among the best things made for television in years.
Fi1m perspective
Sam Miller is in her forties, back in Manhattan, Kansas, sleeping in her dead sister's house and marking standardised tests for a living. That is the opening position of Somebody Somewhere (2022), and it tells you most of what Hannah Bos does. She and Paul Thureen build a comedy around a woman who has decided, well in advance, that nothing much is going to happen to her, and then spend three seasons proving her wrong, gently.
The method comes from the stage. Bos and Thureen founded The Debate Society together and wrote and performed their own plays for years before television, and the habits show: rooms, talk, a scene allowed to run a beat past where most writers would cut. They wrote for High Maintenance and Mozart in the Jungle, co-wrote the feature Driveways (2019), and then made the series with Bridget Everett, with Carolyn Strauss producing. Both writers are from the Midwest and both left it, so the town in the series is written by people who know it from inside and from a distance at once. "We're trying to represent our hometowns as accurately as we can," Bos has said, and for once the claim matches the work.
What works is the pairing of Everett's cabaret force with writing that keeps the volume down, so that the big voice arrives in small rooms and means more for it. What does not always work is the same restraint. There are episodes, mostly in the second season, where a week passes and the only event is a barbecue, and we felt once or twice that Bos, Thureen and their writers were so fond of everyone that they could not bear to let anything go wrong.
We will own that it got to us anyway. We expected to like a foul-mouthed comedy about a woman marking exam papers; we did not expect to be moved by it, and what did it was the patience, the way the writing never makes Sam earn anyone's kindness before she gets it. Seven episodes a season is not many. The third and final season closes before it has quite finished with her, and we would have taken another year.
Bos has so far written one thing at length for the screen, and written it very well. The open question is whether the patience survives a story with more at stake in it, and we would like to find out.
Biography
Hannah Bos is a writer, producer and actress. With her writing partner Paul Thureen, she created and wrote the HBO comedy-drama series Somebody Somewhere (2022–2024), on which she also served as executive producer. She co-wrote the feature film Driveways (2019) with Thureen.
Bos and Thureen met at Vassar College and later co-founded the Obie Award-winning theatre company The Debate Society in Brooklyn. Bos has written episodes of High Maintenance (2016) and Mozart in the Jungle (2016). As an actress, her credits include Driveways (2019), The Outside Story (2020) and The Incredible Jessica James (2017). She was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois.
