“Search Party” began with a missing girl and became a show about another girl who has gone missing in her own way. But its transformation along the way— from self-absorbed millennial comedy, to paranoid murder mystery, to something much darker and the way it straddles, humor, hipster youth irony, and existentialist moral dread—has been astonishing. Launched on TBS in 2016, “Search Party” was initially the story of the wonderfully named Chantal Witherbottom (Clare McNulty), who disappeared from her relatively posh NYC life. An acquaintance of Chantal’s from her college days, Dory Sief (Alia Shawkat) became obsessed with the idea that someone could just vanish off the face of the Earth. Sure, Chantal became the subject of vigils and conspiracy theories, but who was she and why would she leave? And could Dory herself disappear just as easily into this obsession? The first season felt like a Sundance “L’Avventura,” wherein the disappearance said more about the people caught up in the search than the missing person herself.
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At the end of the first season, “Search Party” shifted gears, revealing that most of what Dory and her cohorts— boyfriend Drew Gardner (John Reynolds) and pals Elliot Goss (John Early) and Portia Davenport (Meredith Hagner) – had theorized about Chantal’s disappearance was completely wrong. Just as importantly, “Search Party” S1 ended with the violent death of a private investigator. named Keith Powell (Ron Livingston), with the subsequent cover-up becoming the focus of year two. If the first season was about creating something out of nothing, the second season was about trying to turn a very big something into nothing but filled with an overwhelming Hitchcock-ian sense of guilt and sin juxtaposed next to the Gen-X flippancy and cool music. Dory and her buddies reacted differently to the crime, with Elliot spiraling into madness, Portia channeling her trauma on-stage, and Dory trying to stay one step ahead of the police. It ended with Dory shoving her blackmailer April (Phoebe Tyers) off the Staten Island Ferry before getting arrested for Keith’s murder. It was a shocking turn of events and incredibly ambitious considering what the show was initially billed as: a hangout comedy about a group of privileged, narcissistic 20-somethings with a genre twist, but oh what a dark twist it was.
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It has been two-and-a-half years since that cliffhanger and the show has shifted to a new platform, HBO Max, on which Season 3 will premiere on June 25. Having been shot in 2018, it returns largely familiar to fans of what was on TBS—there are even spots where one can see where the commercial breaks would have been— so don’t expect some radical new tone or the freedom from the content restrictions of basic cable. This is largely the same “Search Party” that fans know and love, although the third season leans into the show’s often surreal nature even more, turning into a commentary on a national obsession with crime and how the media makes the accused into celebrities. In taking on a broader topic than the first two seasons, the new batch of episodes stumbles in places but there’s too much to like in terms of performance, sharp dialogue, and unpredictable plotting to dismiss it entirely. While it may have been stronger when it was more intimate, the writing really carries the season through any minor missteps, along with a refreshing willingness to present its characters in an unflattering light.
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In the new season, the law has caught up with Dory Sief and her friends, although they can’t agree with how to respond to it. Drew adamantly wants to plead self-defense, which seems, well, true, but Dory insists on an innocent plea, claiming they had nothing at all to do with it. As evidence piles up against them, Dory’s steel-eyed commitment to her innocence starts to verge on sociopathic. It’s almost as if Dory snapped that day in Montreal at the end of Season 1, and not only because of the homicide but because everything she had committed to in terms of finding Chantal was wrong. She was so wrong about all of it. And if that could happen to her then she can convince anyone that their version of the truth isn’t black-and-white either. There’s a subtle commentary about simply denying the truth that’s so self-evident – a trend in the current political era – that’s embedded through the season, even if it’s a bit underdeveloped.
One of the most daring things about the three-season arc of “Search Party” is how much the show allows viewers to question their allegiance to its characters. Drew’s subplot in Season 2 that basically involved destroying a marriage so he could flee to Shanghai was just the start. After all, Dory killed April at the end of season two, and the question of how much viewers are supposed to root for her and Drew to get away with all of these criminal acts hangs in the air the entire season. Shawkat plays this angle of Dory well, making her feel colder to her friends and almost expressionless in courtroom scenes. “Search Party” is very smart in the way it allows action to influence and change its characters. The Dory from the series premiere is night and day when compared to where she is in the Season 3 finale and it’s a joy to see an actress as talented as Shawkat get what is really a complex, nuanced character arc over multiple seasons.
The supporting cast doesn’t make out quite as well in Season 3. For the first time, it feels like the writers don’t know exactly what to do with Elliot and Portia. Elliot plans a wedding with Marc (Jeffery Self) and Portia gets involved with Christianity – both subplots feel designed to comment on public image manipulation, which is thematically consistent with the season, but they just don’t feel as involved as the first two years because the narrative naturally has to divide its quartet for most of it. The season really doesn’t know what to do with Chantal, who gets a subplot about starting her own business that’s the weakest element of the new episodes (despite the always-welcome presence of Wallace Shawn).
Luckily, the supporting cast also adds some wonderful new and familiar faces, including Shalita Grant, Louie Anderson, and Michaela Watkins as major figures in the courtroom drama that takes up most of the season. Watkins has always been an underrated talent and she relishes the opportunity to really sink her teeth into the delusional privilege of the accused. Grant and Anderson, as Dory and Drew’s attorneys, couldn’t be more different in terms of style and they keep the legal drama unpredictable.
There are times when the surreal nature of “Search Party” feels like it’s bitten off more than it can chew in Season 3. A show that was once intimate is now on a giant canvas that involves tabloid culture, comments on #FakeNews, and turns its characters into international stars so big that Dory even finds she’s gained a stalker. A show that was once about a girl so unremarkable that she could vanish from the face of the Earth without much fanfare has turned into a show about a girl who becomes the center of attention for the entire planet. The character work from those first two seasons helps ground the flights of fancy of the third, but let’s hope that the fourth season, already commissioned by HBO Max, doesn’t lose although Dory to go missing as an actual person altogether. [B]
“Search Party” returns on HBO Max on June 25.
