When she gets up she shows a patron a picture of a dog shes dreaming about adopting.
The moments of this show are not seismic.
There are no big boardroom deals.
Sandy Morris/HBO
No tantruming megarich eldest boys playing with election outcomes.
No inbred heir mowed down by dragonfire.
No stupidly hot rabbis.
Absolutely zero murders or hate crimes.
Sam watches her friends couple up and feels the loneliness of being the third wheel.
It would be so easy to make Trish a villain.
To make the storylines of this show hinge on queer trauma or the pain of red-state politics.
But nothing is so simple.
Everything is just beautifully, heartachingly normal, hard, mean, and happy, all at once.
I live in a place that is a lot like Manhattan, Kansas.
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to be specific.
And most of the LGBTQ population lives here too.
Maybe people come here because, like Sam, theyre returning home.
But most of us live here because we love it.
Even though we are the majority of Americans, we dont often see ourselves on television.
And if we do, we are often the butt of the jokes, the object of condescension.
We are all looking for somebody somewhere.
We all want love and community.
And political divides, the isolation of the algorithm, make that so hard.
But, in one of the shows more tender moments Joel tells Sam that she is his person.
They are friends, but they are also soul mates.
Somebody Somewhereis a spot of gentleness in a world thats very hard.
A show about connection in a world that seems depleted of it.
