What is it? Girls, if the characters from Girls had purpose.
Why you’ll love it: Search Party is two shows in one. The first is a tightly wound thriller about Chantal, a young woman who goes missing in mysterious circumstances. The second, the padding around this thrusting narrative, is a self-mocking portrait of millennials in crisis.
The characters in Search Party are introduced in a particularly annoying way. They sit around listlessly at brunch tables, drift through a series of vaguely defined, multi-hyphenated nearly-jobs and play the ukulele. They’re white, entitled and utterly infuriating.
The two shows come together when Dory, one of these friends, realises she is a distant acquaintance of Chantal. Starved of anything else to do, with a crap job and a painfully emasculated boyfriend, she immerses herself in the disappearance, playing private investigator just to give herself something to do. She is like Jessica Fletcher, if Jessica Fletcher had a sense of societal ennui about Brooklyn’s rooftop-bar scene.
Almost every scene is beautifully observed, from the ones where Rosie Perez’s concerned bystander gradually unravels to the vigil in episode three that drips with millennial self-obsession. It’s a tricky feat to achieve – combining a relatively high-stakes mystery with laugh-out-loud generational satire – but Search Party pulls it off without breaking a sweat.
For the most part, this is down to Alia Shawkat’s performance as Dory. Although they’re all eventually given something to do, the characters that surround Dory feel broad and stereotypical initially, but she is three-dimensional from the outset. Watching her grow in agency as she digs further into the case is the real pleasure of the series. By the midway point, she has fallen under the wing of private investigator Ron Livingstone and the fire beneath her has become inextinguishable.
Dory starts to feel like she was born to do this. Chantal’s disappearance has given her purpose, and her enthusiasm spills over to her friends. Together they encounter cults and creepy strangers, and the picture keeps getting and bigger, until …
Obviously, I’m not going to spoil the ending for you. But if you watch Search Party at all, make sure you watch it to the end. The final episode ties up all the loose ends, as you’d hope, but it does so in such an unexpected way that you’ll feel violently spun around. Upon a second viewing, after taking note of all the characters and their motivations, the climax may feel like slightly less of a sucker-punch, but hats off to the writers for ending the series on an unashamedly weird note.
And such a final one, too. Two weeks ago, it was announced that Search Party will return for a second series, but the pirouettes it will have to pull to get out of the fix it has created are almost unthinkably complex. Maybe Search Party will turn out to be an anthology series. Maybe that’s the only way to keep it as fresh, funny and thrilling as it is now.
Where: All4.
Length: Ten 20-minute episodes, all available to watch now.
Standout episode: Episode four, where Dory and her pals invite Chantal’s loner ex-boyfriend for dinner, is a perfectly excruciating chamber piece.
If you liked Search Party, watch: The Wrong Mans (Netflix), The Characters (Netflix).
