After a droll, suspenseful, tightly plotted first season, Search Party, the ever-inventive millennial murder mystery, stared down a predicament faced by many television shows whose first batch of episodes provides a clear, satisfying and complete narrative arc: how do you top it for season two or, better yet, how do you prolong a story that might simply be finished?
Given that we’re in a golden age of miniseries, plenty of shows are conceived of with just a single season in mind: Big Little Lies, The Night Of and the standalone narratives of American Crime Story and Fargo, for example. Like Search Party, each episode of Big Little Lies was deliberate, forming a crescendo that reaches a dramatic peak on a bloody stairwell. But the star-studded HBO mystery, despite the fact that its creators caved to audience pressures and green-lighted a second season, is a perfect example of a show that doesn’t need a round two. Its finale was wholly satisfying, and making a second season purely to capitalize on its popularity and Emmy victories might pollute a story – based on a novel without a sequel – that stuck the landing so satisfactorily.
There were similar concerns about a second season of Search Party, which follows a group of selfish, amusing, irredeemably Gen-Y Brooklynites who find themselves embroiled in a search for a missing former college classmate named Chantal. In following a circuitous trail of breadcrumbs, Dory, the brilliantly tepid Alia Shawkat, becomes a kind of bootleg private eye, so disaffected by her city life that practically any alternative, no matter how perilous and unnavigable, seems appealing. So she and her band of misfits – Drew, the fretful boyfriend (John Reynolds); Elliott, the pathologically self-involved gay friend (John Early); and Portia, the guileless aspiring actor (Meredith Hagner) – go looking for Chantal, getting caught along the way in their own of web of lies and half-truths.
Luckily, season two picks up right where season one left off, with one mystery leading, inevitably, to a second, where our protagonists, formerly the amateur vigilantes, are now the perpetrators. Search Party makes this transition so skillfully, retaining all the quirks that led the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum to write that it “basically invents a new genre: the noir sitcom”.
That’s the true achievement of the show – which, tonally, is like the zany lovechild of Girls, Fargo and a Todd Solondz film – but right behind it is Search Party’s smart, purposeful plotting, which takes the characters down unpredictable but mostly realistic rabbit holes and then jerks us back to a gossipy Sunday brunch in Williamsburg (“I just want to have a normal day talking shit about strangers,” says Elliott when Dory fears the ramifications of their actions).
More impressively, while toeing the line between genres, the show rarely hits a wrong note: these white twentysomethings, whether they know it or not, are ensnared in the titular search party not in spite of their own privileged existence but because of it. At the center of the show is, ultimately, a satire of the lengths people go to imbue their otherwise ordinary lives with excitement; in one of the funniest arcs of season one, Elliott is outed in a New York Magazine profile for having faked a stage-four cancer diagnosis, which parallels Dory’s need to solve a mystery that has absolutely nothing to do with her.
In season two, Search Party goes one better with its mock-fatalism: an obelisk awarded for “excellence in interior design” is the murder weapon of choice; one character sneaks through the Canadian border with a fake passport that reads “Margaret Wartime”; a dead man is hastily buried in a discount zebra-print suitcase; Dory tries to hide the dead man’s phone in a random seat cushion on the Metro North; and when Elliott mutters the dead man’s name in his sleep, he tells his rightfully suspicious boyfriend it’s the name of his tormenter, a conversion therapist from his youth. After all, these aren’t cold-blooded villains or model citizens – they act, with a sly authorial wink, exactly as one might expect in-over-their-head millennials to when faced with a decision to call the police or cover up their tracks.
Search Party is, unfortunately, one of those shows that’s drowned out by more popular offerings. But it’s consistently doing something smart and truly original in its blend of high-stakes drama and withering satire, presenting us with uningratiating, superficially criminal characters who aren’t so much inured to the consequences of their actions as they are surprised to be facing consequences at all. And season two, which is both funnier and more tragic than the first, asks us to watch them slither their way out of a whole made manifest, ultimately, by good intentions. From the Saul Bass-inspired promotional artwork to the ominous soundtrack, Search Party sneaks various murder-mystery gimmicks into a single-camera dark comedy that’s bursting with paranoia and unease. And remarkably, co-creators Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers found ingenious ways to prolong a show whose first season ended with a blood-red cherry on top.
- Search Party starts again on TBS at 10pm on 19 November and in the UK on All4 in 2018
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