Can you believe it: I watched an episode of Somebody Somewhere and found myself sobbing.
It’s hardly breaking news. Over the course of the show’s three seasons, HBO’s gem of a TV series has mastered the art of dancing from wry observations that make you smirk, ribald jokes that make you guffaw, tender moments that melt your heart, and ones that pierce something in you so specifically that you can’t help but well up with tears.
Somebody Somewhere is about the Big Feelings that surface from life’s little moments. Sunday night’s episode of the final season found the central character Sam (Bridget Everett) grappling with feelings of abandonment now that her best friend Joel (Jeff Hiller) is moving in with his boyfriend Brad (Tim Bagley). Her heart and her love is big enough to help Joel move, despite her sadness, and to even secretly work with Brad to write an original love song to sing to Joel as a surprise at their housewarming party.
The whole sequence cracked open something inside of me: Brad’s nerves, Sam’s encouragement and genuine happiness that these people have found each other, and the sincerity of Brad’s eventual delivery of the song—met with an overwhelmed and touched Joel, who is experiencing this kind of love for the first time. The Big Feelings flooded out. I’ve never seen something so romantic and purely heartfelt between two gay characters on a TV series like this, especially two men in middle age.
Hiller and Bagley know the scene was a big deal, too.
“You don’t normally get to see people over 40 or 50—gay, straight, anything—being romantic, being seen as even whole,” Hiller tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “Usually they’re there to be sort of the boss or the judge, and to see the wholeness of this relationship is beautiful.”
He points out that it’s not like Joel and Brad found each other “and now we kiss and it snows and it’s all perfect.” The move-in wasn’t seamless. Figuring out how to manage each other’s space and needs, not to mention—a major point—how their spiritual paths might be different, is a major journey they take throughout the season.
“You have to work at a relationship,” Hiller says. “You have to tend to that garden and really make sure that you’re both on the same page. A relationship is laborious. Sometimes you have to pick your battles and understand what you want to fight for and what you want to concede. I love that the series took the time to actually show that, which is something that we all experience in our everyday lives, but you never see on TV or in film.”
Bagley is probably best known to audiences for guest-starring on Will & Grace throughout its run as Larry, one half of a gay couple who are friends with Will and Grace—but who Will and Grace also tend to keep around just to mock.
Any Will & Grace fan, especially a millennial who grew up with it, will tell you how refreshing and necessary the show was and still is when it came to acceptance of the gay community and encouraging young, closeted people to come out. Still, it’s remarkable to chart how far TV has come from the depiction of homosexuality and particularly gay romance on that show to Somebody Somewhere now.
“I remember back then, Max Mutchnick, who co-created Will & Grace, said to me, ‘We want to pitch the network that your character is HIV positive. Would you be okay with that?” And I said, yes, I think that would be awesome. There would certainly be humor, but NBC wouldn’t go for it.”
“We [Bagley and Jerry Levine, who played Joe] were hired to show a couple and to adopt a baby and to show the normalcy of that,” he continues. “When we were hired, they weren’t really having the guy’s date that much. It was just a different time in history, but I loved being a part of that, and I loved the show. I still think it’s an amazing show. I watch it still. But to me, this is so refreshing to be able to show all the depth of what love entails, and how vulnerable it is to fall in love at this age.”
To show all the Big Feelings.
