The final scenes of Somebody Somewhere feature no hidden messages, no big reveals, no closing resolutions or discoveries or choices. The enormous radical shift is simply that Sam is happy now.
Most TV has become relentlessly plot-driven, furiously scouring out any scene that doesn't move the story forward, and even within a network sitcom's circling status quo structure, the most successful new comedies of the past several years have a big will-they, won't-they, a spinoff tie-in, or a hooky premise that promises tension and surprise.
It does everything exactly wrong, according to the current rules of TV. Most recent series must justify their existence with size - the size of the stars, the IP, the budget, the showrunner's reputation, the connected fictional universe, the stakes.
Somebody Somewhere is tiny: a gorgeous, introspective, intimate story about a woman with devastatingly mundane problems whose chief obstacle is her own aching sense of grief and dislocation.
Collection
[
|
...
]