‘Search Party’ on TBS Is The Dark ‘Scooby Doo’ Our Dysfunctional Culture Deserves

Search Party began its TBS run as a cute trifle about an aimless female wannabe detective, a kind of bumbling Middle Eastern Nancy Drew-type played by Alia Shawkat. On the surface, it seemed like yet another show about the love lives of overprivileged New York millennials, but unlike the schizophrenic Girls or the insufferable Master Of None, Search Party has instead metamorphosed into something far darker and more bizarre. It’s no longer even really a comedy. The show takes everything we thought we knew about a generation, and about human nature itself, and peers deep into its darkest recesses. This isn’t a story about finding love or finding yourself. Like Buffalo Bill in Silence Of The Lambs, it wears the skin of its victims.

Basically, Search Party takes the most beloved narrative of our childhoods and turns it into a nightmare. In every mind-numbing installment of The Scooby-Doo Mysteries, the gang drove off in their psychedelic van to visit a friend or relative and found themselves getting involved in absurd and frightening dramas, usually with copious sandwich consumption. This happens in Search Party as well. The gang heads to Canada in a literal mystery machine, a Mercedes SUV that Shawkat’s Dory scams from her pill-addled employer. Without spoiling one of the most stunning twists in TV history, when they get to the show’s equivalent of the haunted amusement park—an antiseptic luxury estate owned by an architect—everything goes completely haywire.

Search Party turns our cartoonish idea of a “mystery” on its head. This is the Scooby Gang our dysfunctional culture deserves. Dory is Velma, short, dark-haired, and intelligent. But instead of having all the answers, she’s actually a psychotic moron who puts everyone in danger. John Reynolds as Drew represents the Fred type, tall, good-looking, smart, and earnest, but his sociopathic tendencies bubble just below the surface. Meredith Hagner as Portia definitely Daphnes it up in her short skirts. Her studied, wide-eyed vapid-seeming beauty hides her intelligence, dangerous insecurity, and tendencies toward vengeance. John Early gives a hilariously loud performance as Elliott, a wacky gay Shaggy type who’s a compulsive narcissistic liar. And maybe it’s unfair to compare the “missing” girl, Chantal, to the great Scooby-Doo himself, she’s certainly a coward who pops up at the wrong time, does the wrong thing, and makes it all worse with her relentless rich-girl self pity.

All four of the principals give tremendously funny performances that require a ton of emotional range. As Chantal, Claire McNulty takes a very unappealing role as far as she can go. Ron Livingston and Christine Taylor are also very good in key supporting roles as the “adults” in the narrative, and Jay Duplass gives a creepy turn as a gaslighting, cultish theater director. But unlike Big Little Lies, which explored similar themes of lying, betrayal, and poorly-concealed misdeeds, Search Party isn’t a consistently transcendent work of art. While the show’s central storyline is legitimately and constantly shocking, some of the subplots feel overwritten and unrealistic. Brandon Micheal Hall, as a reporter and Dory’s ex-boyfriend, occupies a territory of privileged blandness that would be better off in Master Of None. (Plus, since I’m watching this show on SlingTV, I’m constantly subjected to smug commercials for “Josh Vineyards” that have almost persuaded me to fling myself into traffic several times. If I have to see that fake winemaker’s face one more time, I might even skip the end of the season.)

Sponsorship issues aside, Search Party contains exactly the right balance of self-awareness and empathy for its characters. Every time they dig a hole, literally and figuratively, it feels earned, not forced. No matter how absurd the situations become, they are at least semi-plausible. The parodies of the publishing and theater world are also spot-on funny.

It also serves as a great parody of our TV habits, or at least our parents’ TV habits. These are characters who may, at least in Portia’s case, have auditioned for Law And Order, but the concepts of law and order had never really crossed their minds. Michael Showalter and his team of writers are fully aware that they’ve turned the clichés of the detective show on their heads. In the age of Bones and Criminal Minds and that godawful show where Jeremy Piven crowdsources crime-solving by using a supercomputer, nothing gets wrapped up fast in Search Party. The mystery, the guilt, and the suspicion all get drawn out slowly, like a noose being tightened one half-hour tug at a time.

Our protagonists in Search Party are like frogs in boiling water, who can’t get out even as it starts to warm. They would have gotten away with it, too, except in this case, when the mask gets pulled off, it’s not Mr. Jenkins underneath. In Search Party’s world, like in life, actions have consequences, life is no party, and ghosts are very, very real. It turns out that the meddling kids were the problem all along.

Neal Pollack (@nealpollack) is the author of ten bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest novel is the sci-fi satire Keep Mars Weird. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Watch Search Party on TBS.com