If a show can be considered a cult classic while it’s still airing, it’s a title Search Party deserves. At the least, it deserves more attention. While the critics love it, the series is still, uh, searching for a wider audience.
The elevator pitch? Essentially “Gone Girls”: AKA Gone Girl meets Girls. Search Party focuses on listless Brooklynite Dory (Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat), who becomes increasingly obsessed with finding her missing college acquaintance Chantal. Dory leads herself and her pretty, trendy friends down a paranoid, murderous path to find her.
But over its three seasons (and with a fourth on the way next year), this parody of self-absorbed millennials has evolved well beyond its reference points to become its own bizarre beast: an incredibly suspenseful comedy with ever-escalating stakes.
As the show goes on, the search for Chantal evidently becomes just a means to finding a life meaning – and for Dory, the thrill of the hunt is worth more than her relationships and morals. And just like Dory, Search Party is constantly moving – each season plays with a different genre, shifting away from its original noir tones to keep up with her actions (giving away specifics is practically a spoiler of itself).
If Dory is starting to sound a little too reminiscent of Walter White, don’t worry. The show has no interest in revering her as an anti-hero. Nothing is ever played too seriously: Dory’s life is a joke. That’s kind of the problem.
Co-created by New York University screenwriter graduates Charles Rogers and Sarah-Violet Bliss alongside Wet Hot American Summer writer Michael Showalter, Search Party plays with a distinctly privileged millennial existentialism, where college graduates are forced to hustle and grind to have anything resembling the material and social clout they imagined. As the group continually avoids consequences small and large, Search Party teeters with a question: can they coast by on privilege alone? And do you really want them to?
If that sounds a little too similar to the at-times insufferable Girls, then fear not: Search Party has no Marnies or Hannah Horvaths, as it’s simply too claustrophobic to give their issues any oxygen. There’s little time for petty romance or writer’s block when you’re stuck in a Hitchcockian-Williamsburg nightmare of your own making.
Instead, everyday pressures about social status and dating are exaggerated into something much bigger and bloodier. In turn, the show blows up its characters into a ridiculous parody of every boomer’s millennial nightmare, vocal fry and all. It’s a funhouse mirror of the so-called generational narcissism, but the systemic forces behind it – the need to continually brand and sell yourself in a casualised workforce – stay in focus, albeit in the background.
Dory’s friends have their own flawed coping mechanisms, too. Actor Portia (Meredith Hagner) adapts herself to any situation or person, without even realising it; Dory’s wealthy boyfriend Drew (John Reynolds) has never had to think for himself; Elliott, played by breakout star John Early, is a gay social-climber whose ability to survive scandal after scandal outstrips Instagram scammer Caroline Calloway and cancer-faker Belle Gibson combined.
It’s hard to blame them; the rest of the characters – cops, book agents, lawyers, politicians – are no less selfish, always motivated by their own self-preservation. It’d be painful to watch if the script and cast weren’t so endearing and ridiculously funny, and backed with scene-stealing appearances from “oh, it’s them!” actors such as Jordan Firstman, Kate Berlant and Jeffery Self, as well as the likes of Parker Posey and Rosie Perez.
Unfortunately, Search Party’s never had a chance to catch the clout it deserves. Starting off on TBS in America, it jumped ship to find an audience on HBO a few years ago – only to be stuck in a three-year limbo when it waited to drop season three on newly launched streaming service, HBO Max (in Australia, it’s on Stan).
Maybe now Dory and co will get the attention they crave and deserve. Knowing them though, it’ll never be enough.
• Search Party’s first three seasons are streaming on Stan
