Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen met at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where they bonded over being displaced Midwesterners and began writing plays together. A few years later, in early-2000s Manhattan, they met a bawdy, big-voiced cabaret performer named Bridget Everett.

“I played harp in a two-girl ukulele band, and we were often on the same bill as Bridget,” Thureen said recently. “Which kind of makes sense.”

As the three became fast friends, Bos and Thureen came to believe there was more to Everett than her outsize stage personality, which is perhaps best exemplified by her tendency to rub her breasts in an unsuspecting audience member’s face. They saw a quieter, more vulnerable side, and they wanted to write something that honored both that and her rollicking stage persona.

The series the three of them came up with (along with executive producer Carolyn Strauss), “Somebody Somewhere,” premiered in 2022. Its third and final season debuted Sunday on HBO and Max.

“We would keep on doing this show as long as we could, if it was up to us,” Thureen said. “But we also know that it’s not up to us and that in this landscape, more than three seasons of a show our size would be unlikely.”

Set in Everett’s hometown, Manhattan, Kansas, the series finds quiet drama and humor in a pocket of open-minded Midwestern tolerance, where Everett’s character Sam and her friends, including her best friend Joel (Jeff Hiller), deal with loneliness by creating a sort of found family. They’re all trying to have a good time and create meaningful relationships in their small town. “Somebody Somewhere” also, unassumingly, remains one of the most LGBTQ+-friendly series on television, a place where church, beers and queerness coexist with barely a shrug.

In a recent video interview, Bos and Thureen talked about the importance of finding one’s people, the shadow of loneliness and the bittersweetness of saying goodbye. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What was the seed for “Somebody Somewhere”?

PAUL THUREEN: There’s always the show about the person from the small town going to the big city to make it. The fact that Bridget is from the Little Apple, which is what they call Manhattan, Kansas, made the idea of somebody like her finding her people in her hometown really compelling.

HANNAH BOS: It’s really nice. Bridget is from Kansas. Paul is from rural Minnesota. I’m from Evanston, Illinois. We’re trying to represent our hometowns as accurately as we can.

THUREEN: We wanted to make sure our eyes were on every creative detail. We liked the idea of writing a show about people who aren’t very equipped to talk about their feelings, which describes the people that I grew up with. We look at the life struggles and the day-to-day, and trying to get by without having the vocabulary to talk about it. There’s also a self-deprecating humor that goes hand in hand with that. That felt very Midwestern to us.

Q: This season Bridget flirts with the idea of getting a dog, and she has a potential love interest in a mountainous Icelander, played by Ólafur Darri Ólafsson. But she also seems to be feeling more isolated than ever, at least early in the season.

THUREEN: She’s feeling unmoored and she’s wrestling with that loneliness, but in a way that’s not from a place of anger anymore. Her friends have all partnered up, and she’s kind of left out. In the past she would’ve been angry about that, but now she just feels abandoned, totally left alone. It forces her to figure out her own way. It starts out with a dog; maybe that’s the place where she can put her love. But the big thing is just how she’s going to wrestle with that loneliness and find her path forward.

BOS: She keeps growing slowly. This show has very subtle growth, but when you lean back and look at it, there’s a lot of it. This season, there’s extra growth as she sort of opens herself up to love.

Q: Sam’s best friends are gay, and the series presents a very positive depiction of what it’s like to be gay in a small town. Throughout the series Joel works to balance his sexual orientation with his churchgoing life.

THUREEN: It did feel important to show that there are queer communities of faith in small Midwest towns, and that’s something that’s very real. We talked to Jeff [Hiller] about it a lot. Jeff grew up in Texas and he was a theology major, and for him church was his safe space. That’s maybe not what you would expect from somebody growing up gay in Texas, but that’s often where people find their community. In these small towns in the Midwest, you have to work a little bit harder to find your community and find the places where you are safe.

Joel is somebody who got used to changing how he presented himself in the world, and I think that’s something that all these characters do. You sometimes hide parts of yourself to fit into what you think your community would accept. There’s a journey for everybody in this show to figure out how to be their true selves, how to open up. And there’s maybe a little added danger when you’re in rural Kansas. There’s a fine line between trying to realistically depict communities and delving into the trauma that is real. We don’t pretend that those traumas don’t exist. We tried to find that balance the best that we could.

Q: The idea of found family seems like an important part of the series.

THUREEN: You find your people, and I think that’s really important in small-town Midwest, but it’s just as important anywhere else. Sam is somebody whose default habit is to shut down. And Joel in particular is able to see the things that she has to offer the world that she hides away.

BOS: And sometimes your friends can say meaner things than your family does, or call you on your [expletive] just like your sister can.

Q: What are you feeling as the series comes to an end?

BOS: We were happy to get a pilot. We were happy to get one season. We were so over the moon to get two, so to have three is a miracle. We’ve written every season thinking it would be our last. To us, these are real people; they go on past this season. I see them just living their lives after the credits roll.