Paul Thureen writes, with Hannah Bos, about the weeks in which nothing happens: a woman in Kansas marking tests, a barbecue, a friend who turns up. Somebody Somewhere is the proof that this can carry a series, and the caveat is that it barely wants to.
Fi1m perspective
Sam Miller, in her forties, is asleep in her dead sister's house in Manhattan, Kansas, and in the morning she will mark standardised tests for money. That is the whole set-up of Somebody Somewhere (2022), and Paul Thureen and Hannah Bos never add much to it. Most writers would treat a woman who has decided nothing will happen to her as a first act. Thureen and Bos treat her as the subject, and spend three seasons of seven episodes proving her wrong so gently that she barely notices.
The habit comes from the theatre. Thureen spent years in New York with The Debate Society, the company he founded with Bos and Oliver Butler, writing and performing in devised work built around ensembles rather than plots. Television came later: writing on Mozart in the Jungle in 2016, an episode of High Maintenance in 2018, then the feature Driveways (2019), co-written with Bos, which we have not reviewed but which by every account works the same ground. Somebody Somewhere ran from 2022 to 2024 and is the fullest statement of what the pair do. Thureen is a Minnesotan, and the small-town Midwest he writes is neither mocked nor mourned; it is simply where people live.
What works is the fondness. Thureen and Bos plainly like everyone they write, and Bridget Everett and Jeff Hiller repay it with the kind of playing that only happens when actors trust the script not to humiliate them. Thureen has said the pair like "writing about the stuff that's before or after the stuff that usually is the thing that people write about", and the series is exactly that: the drive home, the morning after, the friend at the door. We were moved by it far more than a comedy about a barbecue has any right to manage, and the reason is that the jokes and the grief come out of the same mouth in the same breath, so we were never given time to brace for either.
What does not work is the same fondness. There are stretches, mostly in the second season, where a week passes and the only event is that barbecue, and we felt once or twice that the writers could not bear to let anything go wrong for anyone. Seven episodes a season is not many, and the third and final season closes before it has quite finished with Sam. The nearest thing to a criticism anyone has made of Thureen is that the work is small. It is, on purpose; but small can shade into slight, and the second season shows where the line is.
Whatever he and Bos make next will not have a plot, and it will not need one. Watch Somebody Somewhere first, and give it two episodes before deciding whether nothing happening is your kind of evening. It was ours.
Biography
Paul Thureen is an American writer and creator. He is best known as co-creator, writer and executive producer, with Hannah Bos, of the HBO series Somebody Somewhere (2022–2024).
Thureen and Bos met at Vassar College and later co-founded the theatre company The Debate Society. They have written together for High Maintenance (2016) and other series, and co-wrote the feature film Driveways (2019). Somebody Somewhere received a Peabody Award.
Thureen is from East Grand Forks, Minnesota.
