'Search Party' Creators On The Unpredictable Evolution Of Their Irreverent Millennial Murder Mystery Comedy [Interview]

Created by “Fort Tilden” writer/directors Charles Rogers, Sarah-Violet Bliss, and filmmaker Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick“), the series “Search Party” has become one of the sharpest, unpredictable, and insightful shows on television about identity, denial, and self-actualization—not something you’d likely expect from a would-be millennial comedy on TBS. But “Search Party,” now graduated to HBO Max which recently premiered its third season, has always been much more emotionally complex than it’s looked on the surface. Starring Alia Shawkat (“Arrested Development”) as Dory Sief, a deeply unfulfilled millennial, stuck as a personal assistant to a rich housewife and unsatisfied by her aimless relationship. But Dory finds purpose when a young friend from college, Chantal (Clare McNulty)—who it turns out she didn’t really know—goes missing and she convinces her group of friends, gay hipster/compulsive liar Elliott (John Early), flighty, airheaded struggling actress Portia (Meredith Hagner), and her sweet, doofus boyfriend Drew (John Reynolds), to go looking for the girl.

That’s Season 1, and yes, “Search Party” looks like a send-up of hipsters essentially, but it’s actually a mélange of styles and genres, part irreverent millennial comedy, part murder mystery with lots of harrowing twists and turns and crazy tightropes walks of tone. Like “Fort Tilden,” which explored the hilarities of entitled narcissistic millennials and Gen Z-ers, “Search Party” has that cutting of lacerating humor too it, but considering the many dark turns the show takes and the way it tackles guilt, morality, denial and how we grapple with grave consequences, the show also has Hitchock-ian genre element too. Like Michaelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura”—which you could consider the 1960s European art movie precursor to “Search Party”— “Search Party” soon reveals itself to not be about the missing person at all, but the search party themselves. The inherent narcissism of people perhaps more concerned with their own motivations and things to be gained, rather than the missing person speaks volumes about them and the show witheringly looks at this from a gut-busting perspective, but all one with really surprisingly rich emotional insights (it’s so good, we named it one of the Best TV Shows & Mini-Series’ Of The Decade [2010s])

“Search Party” just arrived on HBO MAX and thus introducing the full series to new audiences on the streaming service, so we’ll go light with details, but we warned there are a few spoilers about Season 1. Suffice to say, their search turns dark and twisted and Dory in her friends find themselves in very morally tight spots by the time Season 3 even begins. “Search Party” Season 4 is done shooting too and in post-production now. While showrunners/creators/writers/ directors Charles Rogers and Sarah-Violet Bliss would not tell me when it would air, considering the paucity of content all networks and streamers will face as the COVID pandemic consequences continue, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see the next season sooner than you think.

I recently spoke to Rogers and Violet Bliss by phone about their “Search Party,” its unexpected emotional intricacies, the way the show even surprises them, and how unpredictability has becomes the show’s ongoing brand.

So, I think the thing that strikes most people about Search Party”—I think maybe some of that was TBS marketing or whatever—is they all think it’s one thing, maybe a comedy about entitled Millennials, or Gen Z-ers, but then you’re thrown for a loop by how dark, complex and twisted it gets. Tell me about the initial pitch versus to where the show got today which is extremely dark, yet still funny and weird.

Charles Rogers: it’s a good question because the show really evolved, and we’ve rolled with it. We had shot the pilot independently, with Jax Media who produces it, so we made the pilot kind of in a vacuum the way we wanted it to feel and that helped people understand it. Prior to that, there had been some moments where [certain TV studio heads] had read the scripts and couldn’t 100% feel what the show’s tone was meant to be and where it could go. So, the pilot proved to people the show was solidly put together and the strange tone it had. It was evocative for people. If we hadn’t done it that way, I don’t know what the whole series would have ended up looking like. It was important for us to plant our flag and then have people understand what the language would be to talk about the show.

Sarah-Violet Bliss: It was also important to cast actors who have comedic chops, but also the depth of these dark situations. The characters can both be so funny, but we needed actors that were also emotionally available to the drama that it takes to hold to really pull off what we were doing. So that was part of the proof of concept to the pilot too.

It sounds like, in a way, you weren’t even sure what the show and feel was going to be and you needed to shoot and edit what you wrote to really see where it landed on the screen tonally, and then let it crystallize from there.
Charles Rogers: Absolutely. One big note we got from TBS early when it got picked up, was to lean into the comedy. Which was like the most welcome note we could possibly get. I think the pilot is a little more serious than the rest of the series. And the show really becomes itself the further into the first season it gets and I think it became what it needed to become. But we’ve learned at every stage what “Search Party” is supposed to be because it keeps changing and evolving. Just when we feel like we’ve figured out what the show is, we have to like start all over again with deal with a new genre every season.

Sarah-Violet Bliss: We work with such talented people in every aspect of it, in every department, so the darker it is, funnier it gets, and the funnier it is, the darker it gets, so it’s truly like this weird ying yang balance.

I totally get that. Sometimes art wants to be something you didn’t exactly intend for it to be and I’m a strong believer that good artists listens to what they’ve made and let it be what it wants to be. You might not set out to write a country song, but you might stumble upon a riff and go, oh, that’s actually country and take its lead.
Charles Rogers: Yeah, absolutely. Totally. That’s a good way of putting it. I mean, obviously country’s not a tone here at all here in the slightest [both laugh]. But sometimes art lands somewhere and you follow it.

Sarah-Violet Bliss: You like the sound and now it’s…

Charles Rogers: We’ll just go more and more country. [laughs]