For anyone from a tight-knit small town who has moved away, the “what if I never left” question may be one that lingers in the mind. This is the story that fuels Somebody Somewhere, which stars the New York cabaret legend Bridget Everett as Sam, who moves back to Manhattan, Kansas, to nurse her sister as she dies of cancer, and ends up settling down, if you can call it that, in the town where she was born and raised. There has always been a sense that this show was fighting against the odds. It is a subtle and gentle tale in a TV landscape that rewards big bangs, and it is one of those beautiful, sad comedies that elicit the occasional belly laugh, but mostly leave behind a low-level hum of melancholy. This summer, HBO announced that this third season will be its last.

Somebody Somewhere bows out as it came in, exploring the push and pull between loneliness and human connection. Sam is finally getting on with her surviving sister, Tricia (a fabulous Mary Catherine Garrison), now that Tricia’s divorce from Rick has come through. Tricia’s commercial empire, built on embroidering one particularly rude word on soft furnishings and homeware, is going great guns and has given her financial stability and a massive car. For Tricia, life as a single woman, whose daughter has left home, brings its own challenges. A related scene between Sam and Tricia, in a hotel bathroom in Kansas City, is one of the show’s rare and deserved belly-laugh moments.

For Sam, it seems as if everyone is moving on or changing their lives, while hers remains in a kind of self-imposed limbo. She thinks about adopting a dog, but her lack of decisiveness sets a roadmap for the season. She is stuck and needs to work out how to wriggle free of her own self-doubt. Tricia is now dating and too busy for regular dinner nights with her sister. Fred (Murray Hill) has had a health scare, and is exercising and trying to avoid french toast. In a sweet and fitting tribute, Sam’s father, Ed, is in Texas, living his best life and fishing; the actor who played him, Mike Hagerty, died in 2022. Joel (Jeff Hiller) is moving in with his boyfriend Brad (Tim Bagley), and working out where his blender will fit in to Brad’s kitchen is the least of it. Their storyline is about painful personal histories and expressions of faith. One of the big questions is which church Joel feels most comfortable in, which is not the material of many comedies, but there are few comedies with quite the same easy depth as this. That said, one of the other issues in his relationship is about toilet habits, which is very Somebody Somewhere.

It is remarkable the extent to which this show can and does burrow into your heart. Joel reminds Sam of a time when she first moved back to Manhattan, when she warned him that she was not good friendship material. If it occasionally seems as if the changes experienced by the characters in this final season have been incremental, then this is a reminder of how much they have grown. Life’s brutal milestones continue to interrupt Sam’s day-to-day. There are money troubles; health troubles; that persistent, nagging question as to whether a “new Sam” will ever emerge, and what she will look like if she does. But these plot developments fade in and out, as mere snapshots of life, while the real substance is in friendship, and what people can, should and do mean to each other.

If this makes the series sound heavy, it has a gorgeous lightness of touch, and, as Joel’s bathroom issues attest, always balks at excessive sentimentality. It does, however, dare to dip its toe into romance at last. Again, this is done in a very Somebody Somewhere kind of way. For Joel and Brad, this takes the form of a sweet song, while for Sam, there are no fireworks, red roses or grand gestures, just a man from Iceland with a substantial beard and a steak-loving dog. After focusing so intently on family and found family, and on platonic love, it has earned the right to tentatively ease its way towards something else. The show ends fittingly, with a sing-song, before it drifts away into the night. It will be missed.