Search Party (TBS)
Created by Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, Michael Showalter
Dory (Alia Shawkat) has no real aim in life. She works as a personal assistant to a rich housewife and in dwindling relationship with her boyfriend. On a walk to work one morning, she comes across a Missing poster for Chantal, a girl she vaguely remembers from college. Apparently, during the weekend of her older sister’s wedding shower in the Hamptons Chantal vanished and her family is starting to think she may have been killed. Dory believes otherwise and makes this mystery the center of her life. She enlists her nebbish boyfriend (John Reynolds) and two best friends (John Early and Meredith Hagner). The quartet attempts to solve the mystery while getting distracted by their day to day lives and bouts of narcissism and ennui.
The depiction of Millennials in popular media has come under scrutiny in the last few years. Shows like Girls, The Big Bang Theory, Two Broke Girls, and more recently The Great Indoors have created some contentious dialogue about just how the Millennial generation should be portrayed. Writer-Directors Bliss and Rogers had previously produced Fort Tilden, an independent film about two of the most grating, yet somehow endearing 20-something young women on a Godot-esque trip to hang out with some guy at Fort Tilden. There was a certain endearing quality to these two central characters despite their surface level vapidity. They were complex and not just figures of ridicule.
Bliss and Rogers bring this same layered sense of character to Search Party and, because of its ability to spend more time with its characters, does an even better job than Fort Tilden. Alia Shawkat leads the cast and could have easily become the straight woman to the antics of John Early and Meredith Hagner. However, she delivers the best performance I’ve ever seen out of her, bringing realism to the feeling many people in their late 20s feel about prospects for their future. Searching for Chantal allows Dory to feel like she is actually doing something rather than just existing. As Maeby Funke in Arrested Development, Shawkat played the kid smarter than all the adults but here she is a character who makes mistakes and gets lost in her own frantic energy to hunt down the truth. There is comedy here but with a lot of well-measured pathos interwoven.
John Early is the obvious stand out from the supporting cast as Elliot. I became a quick fan of Early from a small role he performed in Netflix’s Wet Hot American Summer series, and he went on to be featured in an episode of their The Character anthology. Here we have Early played a character he has mastered, the self-involved insecure, dumb guy. He brags about his charity to bring water bottles to the children of Africa and gets comically frustrated when confused friends start to question the whole premise of the charity. He frequently brings up his teenage bout with leukemia as a way to avoid criticism though it rarely has anything to do with the feedback he’s getting. Meredith Hagner plays Portia, a wealthy kid who has recently booked a role on a Law & Order pastiche. The most painfully real and funny part of this gig is she’s a blonde white woman cast as a Latina police detective and seems oblivious to the inaccuracy. Hanger and Early have fantastic comedic timing and often have the opportunity to play off each other.
The cast member that surprised me the most is John Reynolds as Dory’s boyfriend Drew. This character could easily have come off as a flat, easy to dislike antagonist to Dory. Instead, Bliss and Rogers choose to introduce him that way at the start and subsequently develop him to challenge our first impressions. The relationship between Dory and Drew is much more interesting than I initially expected it to be. In the same way, the characters feel like they are going to fall into those lazy Millennial stereotypes, but the creators work hard to find the genuine humor in that but also show us these are fleshed out people.
At its core, Search Party is a comedy and mystery. The good thing is this is a comedy that is actually funny. The jokes are smart and situational. Nothing feels contrived, and the best humor comes out of the character interactions. This is balanced with a considerably strong mystery. As Dory investigates, she goes down dead ends but always seems to find at least one clue that keeps the momentum going. The answers behind the mystery are satisfying, and even the red herrings turn out to be incredibly entertaining.
I was honestly surprised at how much I enjoyed Search Party. I’ve become tired of the lazy portrayals of Millennials in media and this series manages to acknowledge the truth of some of those stereotypes while adding depths to character types that are often punchlines in other series.
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