Evanston RoundTable, Jan. 30, 2025

The co-creator and co-showrunner of the comedy drama, which last month completed a three-season run on HBO Max to rave reviews, is Hannah Bos, who was born and raised in Evanston and graduated from Evanston Township High School in 1996.

When I asked her how the city has influenced her life and work, she paused, then replied, “Oh man! I could cry. I’m so proud to be from Evanston.”

The show, about a collection of lovable, highly quirky and fascinating people in Manhattan, Kansas, who band together for friendship and support, was mostly filmed “45 minutes from Evanston,” Bos reported with delight, in southwest suburban Lockport. Why there, of all places, I asked? “We shot in the Chicagoland area because of the wonderful crew and Chicago talent,” she explained. Also, one search engine helpfully explained, Lockport (and other nearby Will and Lake County sites) was chosen “because its authentic Midwestern setting reflected the show’s themes and small-town feel.”

For Bos, there’s the hometown connection as well. “It’s very moving to come back to the Midwest and shoot 40 minutes from my childhood home,” she said.

Washington School start

Speaking from her apartment in Brooklyn, Bos told me her love for theater and story-telling began in fourth grade at Washington School in Evanston with Laurel Serleth, the school’s drama teacher. “She saw something in me and gave me such confidence and encouragement,” Bos recalled.

Bos also lauded Jessica Thebus, with whom she studied later at the Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston. Now head of directing and Professor of Theater at Northwestern University, Thebus told me that at Piven’s Young People’s Company, Bos “was a bright light, very creative, very talented, and a pleasure to work with.” A decade later they reconnected at Steppenwolf Theatre, where Thebus was director of education and Bos was an intern in the Young Adults Program, where she helped plan workshops and performances for high school students. “Hannah was still the same,” Thebus recalled, “warm, pleasant and very connected with the people she worked with.”

Thebus said she’s followed Bos’ career with pleasure. “Somebody Somewhere is really an amazing show, it really speaks to people. I’m very proud of her.”

But the strongest influence of all, Bos said, was her mother, an antiques dealer and creative designer and artist who “loved theater.” For many years Charlene Bos owned and ran Recollections, an antiques store on the 800 block of Custer Street just south of Main Street. Theater prop buyers would stop by looking for chairs, desks and other furnishings to use on stage and in movies. Charlene would sell to them but asked for a couple of perks: free tickets and visits for her daughter to go backstage.

Thus, Bos got to visit Goodman, Northlight and other iconic Chicago theater companies as well as John Hughes movie sets. At an age when most girls were largely hanging out with friends, “I got to go backstage and see the inner workings of these famous companies.”

Vasser to Moscow to Manhattan

In 1996 Bos left Chicago for Vassar College, and after graduating, went to Harvard University for its two-year Master of Fine Arts, in part, she told me, to attend the school’s four-month Moscow Art Theater program. She described the program there as “hyper realistic but also a little magical,” which she said was not too dissimilar to the approach at Piven.

After that there was only one logical place for a theater wannabe to end up, and that was New York City. But despite the thrill of arriving at the Big Apple, it was rough going at first. “I was there with no money and no connections,” she recalled.

But she wasn’t alone. Paul Thureen, her fellow drama major and best friend at Vasser (and later the best man at her wedding) came to New York too, and they threw themselves into the theater scene, starting with readings at a midtown bookstore. From there they formed their own company, which became The Debate Society. The plays they helped originate won a slew of prizes.

Thureen said he connected with Bos at Vasser. “She was so funny and unique as an actor, and then we would see plays together and have discussions afterwards, and she was noticing the same funny small details I was. So it felt like a natural creative connection: We were interested and inspired by the same things.

“I grew up in Minnesota, and after college I spent a year in Minneapolis doing theater. I’d email her saying, ‘Hey, if you wind up in Chicago or New York, let me know, it would be fun to work together again.’ That’s how we wound up in New York City.”

I asked Thureen if the show’s central friendship was inspired by his friendship with Bos. “Yes, when we were conceiving the show, we started with the idea of the central relationship being a friendship,” he replied. “It’s not necessarily based on our friendship, but there are certainly parallels, and we drew on our friendship and creative support of each other. As we developed the series, all of us really liked the idea of making something that valued and highlighted how friendships can be core relationships in peoples’ lives.”

Waiting tables

Despite the success of The Debate Society, Bos said, they were still “hustling,” as she put it, “like just about every other actor and director in New York,” waiting tables and working other side jobs. But meanwhile they were moving uptown “to slightly bigger theaters, writing for friends and producing and acting in wonderful self-produced plays.” The Debate Society, she said, “was a really fun theater company.”

She was also starting to write for highly acclaimed TV series, such as the award-winning Amazon Prime series Mozart in the Jungle and High Maintenance on HBO Max.

In 2018, Carolyn Strauss, a producer who had worked with them previously, asked Bos and Thureen to write a show for Bridget Everett, the hugely popular New York City cabaret singer and comedian, who had appeared on Inside Amy Schumer and the Netflix drama Unbelievable.

Everett grew up in Manhattan, Kansas — a town of 54,000 that’s home to Kansas State University and bills itself as the “Little Apple,” not far from the geographic center of the country — and wanted to base the program close by, in Emporia, Kansas. But when the three of them went to visit, Thureen reported, Everett said, “Hey, since we’re so close, let’s go to Manhattan.’ And as soon as we got there, it was obvious to all of us that that was where we wanted to base the show.”

What resulted, according to the New York Times, was a series that “… finds quiet drama and humor in a pocket of open-minded Midwestern tolerance, where Everett’s character Sam and her friends, including her best friend Joel (Jeff Hiller), deal with loneliness by creating a sort of found family. They’re all trying to have a good time and create meaningful relationships in their small town. ‘Somebody Somewhere’ also, unassumingly, remains one of the most L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly series on television, a place where church, beers and queerness coexist with barely a shrug.”

Winning awards

The series has won awards from Critics Choice, American Film Institute, the Television Critics Association, the Hollywood Critics Association and elsewhere as well as being top-rated by Variety, the New York Times and the Hollywood Reporter.

Bos explained that while she and Thureen conceived the series together, many episodes were co-written with Everett and executive producer Carolyn Strauss. They called themselves the “Four Top,” the term for a table for four, since they had all worked in restaurants.

Everett as Sam is a deeply conflicted character — conflicted about what she’s still doing in Manhattan, Kansas, where she came to nurse her beloved older sister through a fatal cancer; and conflicted about herself.

“We deserve to be happy,” her best friend Joel tells her in the first season.

“You know what?” Sam replies. “I’m not sure.”

Another time, Sam complains, “I already do enough thinking about what’s wrong with me. I don’t need anybody’s help.”

The series provides little back story, so I asked Bos what triggered Sam’s angst, which seems at times to amount almost to self-hatred. She replied that Sam’s journey was marked by “a lifelong struggle with self-worth that has been affirmed for her at every turn. Being the sibling of a high achiever, feeling outside of the ‘faith and family’ norm of her community, getting sent the message (verbally and otherwise) from others that’s she’s ‘too much’ (too loud, too filthy, too silly) and also ‘not enough’ (no romantic partner, no kids, no ‘real’ job, no prospects). Being good at things and interested in people that on the surface don’t fit the hometown mold and that she feels judged for. So why even try for happiness?”

But why not? Though they didn’t know the third season would be the last when they wrote it, the series ends on an appropriately positive note. “Over the last two seasons, Sam was learning from her friends and Joel lifting her up and the community around her,” Everett told USA Today. “Season 3 for her is about putting those lessons to practice, to push through it when it hurts — especially when it hurts — to push through it and keep going and try to live a bigger, broader, brighter life.”

In the final episode, at an impromptu party with her friends at the bar where she works, Sam belts out Miley Cyrus’ The Climb, a perfect encapsulation of her own doubts and ambivalence — as well as her ultimate goal: to survive and succeed.

It will be hard to top Somebody Somewhere, a title that might allude to the friends we make when we need to make friends. As for what’s ahead, Bos said she’s just starting to think it through with Thureen, her writing partner. “We don’t know what’s next,” she said.

Meanwhile, they’re still enjoying the show’s unexpected success. At the upcoming Critics Choice awards, Everett and the show are again up for top honors.

As Bos told the New York Times, “We were happy to get a pilot. We were happy to get one season. We were so over the moon to get two, so to have three is a miracle. We’ve written every season thinking it would be our last. To us, these are real people; they go on past this season. I see them just living their lives after the credits roll.”

What makes Somebody Somewhere so special? The show gets many things right, starting with the delightfully quirky piano and trombone tune played in the opening credits to the gentle pacing of the episodes and the brilliant script. There’s the pivotal role of religious faith in Joel’s spiritual journey — so unusual in today’s highly secularized world — and the transcendent meaning and impact of Sam’s songs, especially as sung by Everett in her powerful and supple alto. There’s LOL humor in every episode — you would have to be clinically dead not to laugh till you cry at the famous St. Louis Sushi bathroom scene.

There’s also the wonderful supporting cast, starting with Mary Catherine Garrison as Sam’s sister Tricia, whose three-season arc to become a more loving sibling is beautifully written and acted. There’s Jane Jake Brody as their mom Mary Jo, the late Mike Hagerty in a lovely turn as their father, Murray Hill as the hilarious (and deeply wise) Fred Rococo and Tim Bagley as Joel’s loving partner Brad. But the most important actors are the co-leads, Everett and Hiller, whose extraordinary performances portray a relationship — “a love story between two friends,” as Bos put it — that’s full of great humor but is also deeply touching and poignant. Everett is getting the awards and attention, but Hiller’s performance, though less heralded, is equally important, the sweet and understanding foil to Everett’s conflicted and self-deprecating Sam. Think Lennon’s musical rough edges and McCartney’s melodic sweetness.

“We tried to write a show that we would want to watch and a world we would want to live in,” Bos told an interviewer from The Queer Review, adding, “I was thinking about all the lonely people: I hope they find comfort in our show.”

It’s a world we would all wish to live in, where friends and family buoy us up and help us through life’s ever-painful traumas.