“They threw in the dead sister, and I was sold,” Everett said. With this prompt, Bos and Thureen, writing partners who have worked on “High Maintenance” and “Mozart in the Jungle,” pitched a show that drew on Everett’s real life - Kansas upbringing, unholy pipes, a mother who drinks, a sister who died young - and then imagined how this woman might express herself in a place that didn’t seem to welcome her heart or her gifts. Sam sits on the couch a lot in her underwear. She has a soul-eating job at an educational testing center and various family obligations - a father (Mike Hagerty) with a struggling farm, a mother (Jane Brody) with addiction issues, and a sister (Mary Catherine Garrison) with a wobbly marriage and an Instagrammable approach to evangelical Christianity. After years of bartending in a big city, Sam has returned to her hometown. (Not very close, as it turns out, though Everett said that the sides were delicious.) She was joined by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, the creators of “Somebody Somewhere,” a wistful Kansas-set half-hour comedy that arrives Sunday on HBO.Įverett, 49, stars as Sam, a woman whose biography parallels her own, to a point. This was on a Monday afternoon in mid-December at John Brown BBQ, a purveyor of Kansas City-style barbecue in Queens, which is to say the closest that a person can get to Kansas within the New York City limits. “I would probably work in a restaurant and have two D.U.I.s and sit on the couch a lot in my underwear.” “I’d probably live in Kansas City, or Lawrence,” she said. Sometimes Bridget Everett, the actress, comedian and self-proclaimed “cabaret wildebeest,” wonders what would have happened if she had never left Kansas.

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