A Perfect TV Series Finale Ends With a Miley Cyrus Ballad

This week:

• Everyone is horny for an assassin.

• The dish on the perfect series finale.

• Patti LuPone 4ever.

• The casting that needs to happen immediately.

She’s Just Being Miley

There’s always gonna be another mountain. I’m always gonna wanna make it move. Instead, I’m going to scale it and scream from its peak that the series finale to Somebody Somewhere, which is now available on Max, is one of the best half hours of TV I’ve seen this year—and featured an epic performance of a Miley Cyrus song.

The series stars Bridget Everett as Sam, a middle-aged woman who moved back to her Kansas hometown to deal with a family tragedy, sparking her own journey to finally figure out what she wants from life. It’s a scary path to walk down—the ambition of self-fulfillment of seeking happiness leaves a person extremely vulnerable to rejection and disappointment.

Somebody Somewhere traveled that path with booming emotion and ribald humor, culminating in a moment in the series finale that can only be described as ecclesiastical. Sam finally centers on an understanding of her own worth and how she is valued to her friends, family, and community. She commemorates this epiphany with a song—her love language—and performs a barn-burning of Miley Cyrus’ “The Climb.”

“The Climb” is a ballad Cyrus recorded for The Hannah Montana Movie, which might signal that it’s juvenile; no, it slaps. Especially when Everett is performing it.

“That was Bridget’s choice,” Somebody Somewhere co-creator Paul Thureen told me, after I confided that my soul just about left my body when I recognized the opening chords to the song during the scene. “What a way to end. What a way to go out.”

Everett was emphatic. “It could only be ‘The Climb,’” she told me. “I’m just so f---ing happy that that happened.”

“I used to sing it a lot on the road to close my shows,” she continued. “I’ve been singing it for a while, and I think that there’s something about it that, like, you don’t expect Sam to sing a Miley Cyrus song, especially a Hannah Montana song. And the lyrics are so sort of literal. But I just love it.”

If you’ve been watching Somebody Somewhere, it was a moment for which there were not enough Kleenex in the world. “It’s been a song that’s been with me for a long time,” Everett said. “I’m so happy that we found a way to work it in.”

Crucial Patti LuPone Update

How do I give proper backstory to this without writing 47,000 words?

Patti LuPone was supposed to star in the original Broadway production of Sunset Boulevard after playing Norma Desmond in London, but was unceremoniously fired and replaced with Glenn Close. She sued over it, and now has what she calls the “Andrew Lloyd Weber Memorial Pool” at her house, which she partially paid for with the eventual payout. She also has been outspoken over the years about how bad she thinks the show is just as theater material.

But this week, she went to see the splashy Broadway revival starring Nicole Scherzinger, and was ecstatic.

“I went in with trepidation because I have strong feelings about the show. Not what happened to me in the show, but the show, period,” she said. “I loved this production. I thought Nicole [Scherzinger] and Tom [Francis] were stunning. I thought Nicole was unbelievable. She broke my heart. She is a force.”

“I thought the cast was fantastic, the lighting,” she continued. “The use of the filming was something that I questioned because I don’t know where I am. Am I at a movie or at the theater? This worked brilliantly. The whole thing. The whole thing. I was energized when I left the theater. I loved it.”

If your interests overlap with mine, this is quite simply the biggest news to ever happen in your lifetime. As one user wrote on X, “This is like hearing Jesus complimenting the woodwork of the cross.”

This Needs to Happen

It’s a lot of work juggling multiple fake husbands, but I’ve always had a strong professional ethic.

Imagine how I’m reacting to the news that two of them are trying to collaborate with each other.

In a recent interview, Jonathan Bailey said that he and his friend, Andrew Scott, are looking for a project to act in together.

Bailey starred in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s TV series Crashing, and Scott was famously the Hot Priest in her show Fleabag. In other words, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, this is your public duty, what you were put on this Earth for. Make it happen.

What to watch this week:

Carry-On: Finally, Netflix gives a legitimately great action thriller. (Now on Netflix)

Paris & Nicole: The Encore: This The Simple Life reunion means so much to me. (Now on Peacock)

Dream Production: Alert the kids! (OK, and all of the adults, too.) The Inside Out spinoff series is so charming. (Now on Disney+)

What to skip this week:

Kraven the Hunter: One movie just assassinated the entire superhero genre. (Now in theaters)

Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim: Banish it back to Middle Earth. (Now in theaters)