Search Party is the sort of television show that sounds awful on paper: a bunch of Brooklyn narcissists distracting themselves from brunch with tragic news about an old university classmate. But as anyone who’s enjoyed bingeing this series – which mixes pin-sharp observational comedy with the murder mystery genre – will tell you, it’s one of the cleverest TV satires in years.
Alia Shawkat, best known as Arrested Development’s wise-before-her-years character Maeby Fünke, plays Dory – a bummed-out college graduate sleepwalking through life as a personal assistant. She endures a passionless relationship with drippy Drew (John Reynolds) who barely tolerates her sarky best friends, self-diagnosed narcissist Elliott (John Early) and waspy actor Portia (Meredith Hagner). So when Dory learns about the disappearance of fellow alumnus Chantal Witherbottom it shakes her out of her stupor. She throws herself into the role of private eye – even though she didn’t really know Chantal at college.
“This mystery has kind of awakened a purpose that she’s been searching for,” echoes the show’s co-creator, Sarah-Violet Bliss.
Soon Dory is bunking off work and blowing out Drew to follow up leads. She stumbles across a copy of Anna Karenina that belonged to Chantal, with a passage marked “important!” that reads: “The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it.” Suspects present themselves: was it Chantal’s creepy ex Gavin or a sleazeball dad who hired Chantal to babysit his kids? How is a sinister Goop-with-black-candles cult run by Brick (Parker Posey) involved and what are we to make of loopy real estate agent Lorraine (Rosie Perez)? When Dory runs across a real detective (Ron Livingston) who’s also looking for Chantal, it confirms everything she’s been thinking: she’s on to something big.
Search Party launched in the US over Thanksgiving weekend on the TBS network in a familiar all-episodes-at-once move and was a surprise late entry into the “best of 2016 TV” end-of-year lists from Vanity Fair and Entertainment Weekly. In part, that’s down to the laser-focused accuracy of its jokes and social observations, but also the show’s unusual use of a classic murder mystery structure, with cliffhangers at every turn. “I like to describe it as a hipster Columbo,” says Shawkat.
According to Bliss, it wasn’t so much that she was setting out, with co-creators Charles Rogers and Michael Showalter, to make a big statement about hipster millennials (that “makes me cringe!”); more to “put a magnifying glass on it. When I’m having brunch in New York and I can overhear their conversations and they sound terrible!”
There’s a knowing wink at all this in Search Party, from the icy ringtone electro of Purity Ring’s theme tune or the way that Elliott tweets “In Shock. Sad news about a sweet girl. Keep an eye out, people” seconds after saying Chantal sucked. A candlelight vigil hosted by the distressed Witherbottom family includes an a cappella performance of Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone and the announcement of official hashtags. “People like to perform their grief on social media – like whenever a celebrity dies, people have to make it about themselves,” says Bliss of the Snapchat generation. “The hashtags are annoying – like “#IamChantal” – what does that even mean?”
But the show is as much about fixie bikes and artisan moustaches as it is about shadowy cults and unusual suspects. For Shawkat, the appeal of Search Party was “the mystery aspect”. To make sure this side of Search Party’s story worked, Bliss and the other writers delved into the genre, deconstructing its tropes from cliffhanger revelations to dodgy alibis. “If it’s a good mystery they won’t give you the answer until the end,” she says.
The murder mystery is a plot engine that powers the story through a series of bold tonal shifts: it looks like a modern sitcom, but also nods to the 1970s cynicism of noir films such as The Long Goodbye or Night Moves. Unlike other neo-noir riffs such as Rian Johnson’s 2005 film thriller Brick or last year’s The Nice Guys, it also draws on the sincerity of pesky kids like Nancy Drew or the Scooby-Doo gang where everything is wrapped up in time for tea. Bliss says that Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery was their closest reference, where they wanted to ask, “What would it be like if someone like me and my friends got caught up in this?”
Perhaps this is why they chose to shoot a pilot episode first rather than try to pitch a script to a network: the ultimate in DIY show-don’t-tell. The barrier to entry may be more expensive, but it’s a move that’s closer in spirit to a band recording demos on their own, or indie cinema. This is one of the more surprising directions that this second golden age of TV is now taking us – fully formed worlds that are confident enough from the get-go to play with expectation and form, to push the boundaries of what “TV” might look like. Audiences are used to the half-hour format doing more than just making us laugh. There’s a freedom that comes from knowing you can talk to a smart, telly-literate audience, and Search Party runs with it.
That’s not to say it’s not very funny – there’s a coffee gag about half-and-half milk that’s every bit as sharp as Larry David’s order of “vanilla bullshit” on Curb Your Enthusiasm – just to note that it manages to swerve and dive from sitcom into oddball drama without missing a beat. At times you feel as if you’ve ended up in a different show but it works; Search Party is like a great album that can do loud and quiet, sometimes in the same song.
The success of the first season has brought news of a second being confirmed. So what can we expect? Shawkat teases, “Is Dory going to get worse? It’s more interesting to watch someone get more fucked-up than less!” Bliss confirms that Search Party S2 will be about the same four characters but, beyond that, keeps it cagey. “I cannot tell you, but I will say – she’s not going to open a detective agency. What happens will feel organic, and dark and funny. Fun to watch.” Party on, in other words.
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