This is Church: HBO’s Somebody Somewhere Finds Religious Experience in Unexpected Connections
There’s a certain kind of person I typically associate as a “church-goer.” Growing up in my Southern Baptist community in Florida, I saw an archetype of people that were exactly what you’d expect them to be — especially if you’ve been watching HBO’s other current delight, The Righteous Gemstones. My church was full of self-important folks in their Sunday best, speaking in catchphrases right out of the Evangelical playbook, who, try as they might, could rarely muster anything more genuine than an “I’ll pray for you” when someone truly needed support.
When I started to break away from that community as a 16-year old (who also attended the church’s high school), I was so lost without the framework that had been supporting me since I was a child. It was like, all of a sudden, I was bowling without bumpers, and every ball I threw was landing in the gutter.
It wasn’t until years later, through curiosity and a genuine need to understand if and why I no longer needed a concept of “god” in my life, that I found myself graduating college with a minor in Religious Studies and a desperate need to be anywhere but where I was. So, Los Angeles became my target, and 5 months after graduation, I was sleeping on my sister’s lumpy couch in Sherman Oaks, ready to take on the world.
What I ended up unexpectedly experiencing was that “church” could be anywhere I wanted it to be.
When Somebody Somewhere was announced in mid-2021, I was immediately on board. I’ve loved Bridget Everett for years. Watching videos of her cabaret shows in NYC, enjoying every time she’d pop up in hilarious projects like Lady Dynamite and Inside Amy Schumer, and voting for her brilliant Amazon pilot Love You More in 2017, I knew I would be watching this show from the start. Throw in the Duplass Brothers producing, Jeff Hiller and Murray Hill co-starring, and it felt like this show was made for me by the TV powers that be. What I wasn’t prepared for was the fact that in the course of 7 half-hour episodes, I would be brought back to church. I would be brought back home.
To unpack this a bit more, I will have to use a bit of my Religious Studies minor here. Get ready, nerds.
In the late 18th century, German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher published a book called On Religion. In it, he attempted to reconcile Protestant Christian thought with the Age of Enlightenment and Romanticism that dominated Europe in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. Without getting too in the weeds with details, simply put: Schleiermacher’s work posed that there might exist an overlap in the traditional concepts of “god” and “religion” and the Enlightened and Romantic movements that sought to exist in the separation of church and state. His ideas challenged Enlightened Romantics to reframe their scientific and artistic expressions into something they would never have considered: religious experiences. Schleiermacher argues, that in this new interpretation of “religious experience” its “essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling.” (pg. 22, On Religion)
Arguably, this would make Enlightened Romantics capable of experiencing “god” through scientific breakthroughs, artistic inspirations, and transcendent moments — anything that makes them feel a connection to more than themselves.
If there is no one “religious experience” more meaningful or true or real than the other, then, to quote Dan Harmon,“every place is the center of the universe. And every moment is the most important moment. And everything is the meaning of life.” Essentially, any moment could be a moment that helps you feel “god” in your life. More importantly, every moment should be cherished as much as possible, because our time as humans is fleeting, temporary, and sacred. It’s important to recognize the “intuitions of the infinite” (as Schleiermacher calls them) when they happen.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this the entire time I was watching Somebody Somewhere. When Sam (Bridget Everett) returned to her small Kansas hometown to take care of her dying sister, Holly, she seemingly put everything in her life on hold to take on the burden of helping her sister. When viewers meet Sam in the pilot episode, however, we quickly realize that she might be using the trauma and grief of Holly’s passing as an excuse to continue to keep her life in stasis. She sleeps in late most days on a worn out couch in Holly’s living room, unable to go into her sister’s bedroom. She’s back, but not rooted. She’s in a house, but it doesn’t feel like home.
Enter Joel (Jeff Hiller), Sam’s mild-mannered, unassuming co-worker who remembers her from high school in one of the most tenderly awkward (re) meet-cutes I’ve seen in years. This tentative connection quickly blossoms into the central relationship of the series, with Sam and Joel’s friendship anchoring a stable of stellar performances. Through her relationship with Joel, Sam is able to literally find her voice again — she is a vivacious singer who wowed audiences in high school, but has done little to pursue music since then. When Joel invites Sam to “Choir Practice,” a queer-safe event that takes place after hours in a church that’s housed in a run-down mall, Sam begins a journey that will bring her home.
Throughout the course of Somebody Somewhere’s first season, viewers are given a front row seat to Sam not only finding herself again, but finding a new kind of “religious experience” within the community that accepts and encourages her. When Joel suffers his own crisis of faith, it’s Sam who pulls up to his house, and emphatically urges him to get back on the church horse. “I know that if there was something very important to me that I was pretending not to miss, WWJD huh? ‘What Would Joel Do?’ He’d come over to my house, he’d put me in a bra, he’d walk me out the door, and he’d get me back into life.”
This moment was when it all clicked for me. Somebody Somewhere isn’t just about Sam healing after her sister’s death. It’s about her having a religious experience through her friendship with Joel, and knowing that it’s too important to lose. And Joel being back in church, contented in his faith, is central to Sam’s own burgeoning understanding and acceptance of herself — even as someone who has admittedly never even been inside a “real” church.
For Sam, the death of her sister and the burden of holding her family together during all of the subsequent crises has awakened a sense of purpose and self that finds her at Joel’s house, on a very early Sunday morning, literally pushing Joel “back in the house of the lord” to get him “all Jesus-ed up.” For her, the recognition that Joel needs his relationship with the Christian church to be his fully realized self leads to what I believe is the most powerful scene of the season, and perhaps the main statement Somebody Somewhere might be making.
This thesis may be rooted in my own experience, but I think that the arc of the season finale mirrors many of the concepts that Schleiermacher posed could be “religious experiences” or “intuitions of the infinite.”
When Sam suggests that Choir Practice could be held inside her family’s barn, she enlists the help of Fred Rococco to present the idea to Joel. After a fun night of getting lit, Fred rounds everyone up into a purple party shuttle and drives them all to Sam’s barn. It’s there that Sam is finally able to share the music that she’s convinced herself was never good enough for public consumption, even hiding it from Holly until her death. She dedicates a simple, beautiful song to Joel, and in front of her small group of friends, Sam expresses all of the love and gratitude in her heart for the person who brought her back home. When she finishes, Joel is in tears, and when Fred wants to move on and get back to the party, Joel emphatically tells them “no, let’s just stay in the moment for a little bit, Fred.”
Back on the bus and back to the party, the gang drunkenly enjoy the night, culminating in Sam serenading the group with some more of her songwriting, electrically singing what I’m assuming are lyrics from her song Mrs. Diddles that Joel had been begging to hear all episode: “I’m gonna wrap this pussy around every dick I can. Wrap this pussy around every boy and man. I’m gonna wrap this pussy around these United States. Keep my country warm.”
Joel joyously exclaims “THIS IS CHURCH!” and the entire bus agrees.
Sam ends the night (and the first season) with a contemplative smile on her face, leaves the couch behind, and finds a peaceful night of sleep in bed, finally able to be in Holly’s room again. She’s made it home after all. The end credits begin to roll, and the eponymous lyrics of one of Kansas’ greatest hits fade out slowly, reminding the audience that “all we are is dust in the wind.”
