One Saturday last fall, my husband and I bought an antique clawfoot bathtub in Manhattan, Kansas. After loading it from a stranger’s backyard into the bed of our truck, we walked to the Chef, a downtown diner, figuring we might be seated quickly with half the town tailgating at the Kansas State University football game.
We drank Bloody Marys on the patio among White, Black, and Brown diners while purple school flags waved in the autumn breeze. Our server pointed to a pile of blankets in case I got chilly.
When we left, I handed my blanket to a trio of men eating bacon and wearing hunting gear. “In case you get chilly,” I said. They laughed. Then the server, who was wearing facial hair, makeup, men’s shoes, pearls, and a crop top, refilled their coffee cups.
Unfashionable places such as Kansas—“one of the square ones in the middle,” coastal acquaintances have said to me with a smile and a shrug—are often portrayed by Hollywood as a homogeneous expanse of “uneducated,” White, straight, cisgender conservatives who are cooking meth or terrorizing outsiders.
Perhaps that is because most of those employed as storytellers or gatekeepers in film and television have led urban lives geographically removed from regions condescendingly known as “flyover country.” Similarly, many of the people I’ve worked with at coastal media outlets have never set foot in my region. Their assumptions formed in lieu of direct experience often rely on clichés.
Yet there we were, that sunny Saturday, living amid a richness omitted by dominant narratives: the Hispanic-named woman whom I paid for the tub, the server who refuted gender norms while working for tuition money, hunters with deer blood on their pants, my leftist-carpenter husband, and this farm girl who had returned home following professional stints in major cities.
A few months later, I watched the HBO show Somebody Somewhere, improbably set in Manhattan, Kansas. The second episode includes a brunch scene at the Chef involving a biracial gay couple, a transgender agriculture professor wearing purple, and a farm girl who returned home. Any one of them seemed apt to refinish an old clawfoot tub.
The exquisite accuracy of the show—shocking and even moving to a resident of a region more often misrepresented, lampooned, or altogether ignored in popular culture—is not just in its unceremonious diversity. It is in its authentic set design, over which Kansans I know have pointed and exclaimed with glee. There’s a candle poured by that company in Ellinwood! A bag of chips from the Kansas City snack factory! The local craft beer, the local-dive T-shirt, the real-life storefronts—on the same TV screen at which we have spent a lifetime groaning when “Kansas” has mountains on the horizon.
As it happens, Somebody Somewhere, the first season finale of which aired last Sunday, was filmed outside Chicago. Landscape shots thus feature cornfields rather than Kansas’s more common export, wheat. But those steering the show know firsthand the town and region they depict. Star and executive producer Bridget Everett is from Manhattan, Kansas, while creators Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen are both from the Midwest.
Together they give us not just uber-cred detail but regional and rural ubiquities: the Ford Ranger pickup, the small gift shop selling potpourri, the amiable neighbor dealing fentanyl, the antique milk churn on a patio, the dangerous grain bin. The braless, heavy-set grocery shopper in Walmart sweats is there too—not as the butt of a joke but as the talented, compelling star of the show.
Forgoing the caricature of rurality as frighteningly remote and disconnected, Somebody Somewhere also nails the liminality of town and country, for many. The main character, Sam, works, eats, shops, and sleeps in Manhattan—which, with a population of fifty thousand, is not small by Kansas standards—and makes a short drive to visit her folks’ struggling farm. The show even manages to handle my state’s love-hate relationship with The Wizard of Oz, referenced both in overarching theme and tongue-in-cheek plot points, without offense.
To get a place wrong, over and over again, is at once an insult to and an invalidation of its people. To get a place right, then, is a healing of sorts.
When my 2018 book Heartland was published, I heard from thousands of readers who were relieved and delighted to recognize in its pages their unsexy place, or a place much like it. The book is an intersectional critique of our ill-addressed socioeconomic class structure, my family’s rural poverty serving as a springboard to analyzing US history, policy, and culture. But many readers just wanted to tell me where they were from. Across lines of race, religion, class, and political ideology, from the rural South to small-town Idaho to upstate New York, they essentially said, “You captured a place like mine, and now I feel seen and understood.”
National headlines often reduce such places to strictly political frameworks: How do they vote, and why? The esteemed panel confidently answering these questions rarely includes someone from the place being discussed. The resulting blind spots lead to false estimations, as a roundly stunned national media proved during the 2016 presidential election.
At a moment when our social fabric is tearing, we would do well to look at the true threads of every unseen and misunderstood place. Efforts to diversify the powerful spaces that tell stories and create culture—newsrooms, publishers, Hollywood writers’ rooms—must address place, geography, and class as identity markers.
Somebody Somewhere proves that doing so is not at odds with other forms of inclusion but, rather, elevates accuracy in intersectional ways.
Jeff Hiller, who plays the sweet White dork Joel, recently reflected on finding a script about not just the hardship of fitting into a small town as a queer person but the beautiful ways people do so. Hiller, whose character introduces Sam to an upbeat group of misfits and queers who gather in a church space, had a parallel experience in real life.
“I went to Texas Lutheran College in a small farming town, and there was this one female pastor who held church services on Saturday evenings where we’d have champagne and it was all queer folks,” Hiller told the website Them. “[There] we could be authentic, genuine people, and we were accepted. So when I read the pilot and saw this character who was gay—for the most part openly gay—and also a member of a faith community, I was shocked… I can’t think of any other examples of a faith community on TV with queer people in it who aren’t being persecuted.”
In the show’s resoundingly positive reviews, much has been made of Sam’s struggle to fit in after moving home to care for her dying sister. She’s a White farmer’s daughter but also progressive and offbeat—how will she ever be content there, where women collect throw pillows and cook casseroles for their husbands? The question, presented by the show overtly, understandably resonates with TV critics choosing to live in hip, sophisticated environments.
Worth equal consideration, though, is the fact that Joel, who is no less progressive and offbeat, is happy in that same place—volunteering for community causes, dreaming of raising children with his brown-skinned boyfriend, and probably collecting throw pillows in a town where bitchy homophobes and thriving homosexuals coexist. Joel is not in Manhattan, Kansas, because he couldn’t make it in Manhattan, New York. He is there because, as he defends it to Sam, “This is where I live.”
Sam’s trajectory, meanwhile, is not the linear American dream—“get out,” climb up the ladder, and never look back—but the circular journey of the hero who returns home. She never did much climbing, it turns out, and “getting out”—even for those deemed successful—is always an illusion. We carry our backstories with us, and many who leave are eventually summoned home, whether by familial duties or an abiding affection for the complicated place that shaped them.
One real-life homecomer, Skylar Baker-Jordan, recently wrote for the Daily Yonder about returning to his tiny hometown in Kentucky. Upon moving to Chicago, he found himself defending his home when repeatedly asked what it was like to be gay in the rural South.
“My answer, that actually I didn’t have such a bad time of things after high school, always seemed to disappoint folks,” Baker-Jordan wrote. “It was as if they wanted to hear I had spent the better part of my life running from rednecks in pickup trucks firing rifles at me. In reality, those rednecks were my family and friends.”
Filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung juxtaposed identities of race, ethnicity, and place with his semi-autobiographical, award-winning 2020 film Minari, about Korean immigrants in rural Arkansas.
“Everyone always talks about the immigrant stuff. To me, this is an Arkansas story or a farming story,” Chung told the Arkansas Times. “There were a lot of people on set from Oklahoma, and on set I felt like there was this interesting divide between the Korean people and the local Oklahoma people. I’m kind of in between both.”
Many in our society are untethered from home by the forces of capitalism, the disembodiment that the digital age engenders, and the homogenizing cultural effects of globalization. The class that joins Hollywood meetings via Zoom calls from tropical beaches might even fancy itself post-place. What some of them miss, and what Somebody Somewhere makes us laugh and cry by revealing, is that in this moment of cultural division, place is a tie that very much still binds.
In another recent hit show, Ted Lasso, the title character leaves Kansas to coach British footballers. Lasso, whom creator and star Jason Sudeikis based in part on his real-life high school basketball coach in Kansas, relishes the professional opportunity but longs for his broken family back home. Tig Notaro’s acclaimed dark comedy One Mississippi, which shares Somebody Somewhere’s themes of mortality and homecoming, occasionally leans on regional stereotypes for a laugh but treats Notaro’s native small-town Mississippi with fairness and affection. It is possible to write a story or create a show that scorns or diminishes the place you’re from, but these shows successfully handle place because of their creators’ geographic identities.
In one of Somebody Somewhere’s most touching moments, the cheerful agriculture professor, Fred, stands in a field advising Sam’s aging father, Ed, to plant cover crops for soil regeneration. Ed, played by Mike Hagerty, sounds like the actor’s native Chicago but conjures for me my gentle, suspenders-wearing grandfather all the same.I He laments the challenge of long-term planting strategies when survival of the farm is a short-term concern. Fred, played by the drag king Murray Hill, consoles him, saying, “You’re a real good steward of your land.”
Their dialogue was the first time I recall seeing a character on-screen offer the highest compliment, where I’m from—to say, in essence, “you do well by this place.”
Storytellers, in Hollywood and beyond, should seek to do the same.