When the second season of the dark comedy “Search Party” came to an end, in 2017, the four entitled millennials whose bumbling shenanigans animate the show were in very hot water. (For those of you who haven’t watched, spoilers ahead!) Dory Sief (Alia Shawkat), who, in her meandering search for a purpose in life, began pursuing the trail of Chantal Witherbottom, an old college acquaintance who had gone missing, was arrested for the killing of Keith Powell, the private investigator who was also looking for Chantal. Dory’s accomplices in the crime—her mild-mannered, preppy ex-boyfriend, Drew (John Reynolds), her self-important, self-loathing gay friend, Elliott (John Early), and her ditzy, excitable actress B.F.F., Portia (Meredith Hagner)—knew that their time was almost up, too. And, though more than three years have passed since the series last aired, “Search Party” (which has, in the meantime, decamped from TBS to the new HBO Max platform, where it is now streaming) begins its third season with no preamble, right where it had left off. As the first episode opens, a fashionably turned-out Dory, hauled offstage by police in the midst of an Election Night celebration for a senator whose campaign she worked on, finds herself in the back of a squad car, en route to be booked. Hearing of the arrest and fearing that they might be next, Drew, Elliott, and Portia, huddling for an emergency consultation under a subway overpass, agree to “just go home and act like we are innocent, ” as Drew puts it. “O.K., so we do nothing. It’s a pact!” Portia rejoins.
Good luck with that! If characters did nothing, we wouldn’t have plot, and, though this holds true for most forms of narrative art, it’s perhaps especially so for a show like “Search Party,” whose crowded story lines advance by dint of its protagonists’ irrepressible propensity for foolish, impulsive action. Much of the show’s hilarity, along with its tension, proceeds from observing these characters’ blinkered doings: their self-involvement keeps them from considering any kind of larger picture, and yet they forge ahead into the world, blindly and obstinately. Even Dory’s decision to seek out Chantal, which served as the series’ spur, was revealed, in the course of the first season, as deeply misguided. (“I guess you could say I mishandled my ambition,” a handcuffed Dory tells an old high-school classmate she runs into after being booked, in the current season’s first episode.) Chantal, it soon became clear, was not a tragic heroine who needed to be saved, as Dory had convinced herself and her friends was the case, but a bratty drip, whom the gang couldn’t wait to get away from as soon as they found her. Far from being imperilled, she was taking a self-pitying vacation from her own life after a middling breakup, holing up in a plush Montreal summer home. Dory and her friends spent the show’s second season attempting, paranoiacally and incautiously, to clean up the fallout from this needless rescue mission. It’s no surprise that, in the show’s third season, these characters’ instincts continue to be uniformly terrible, as they become increasingly embroiled within ever-murkier, ever-more-complex schemes. “Search Party” is a noir, but also a comedy of manners, and, this season, a courtroom melodrama, besides; what unites these cross-genre turns, however, is the sure sense that no matter what happens, the show’s protagonists will do the wrong thing, and that, as viewers, we will get to observe, with both laughter and dread, the amusing, maddening paths they take.
Once Dory is hauled in by the police, the gang, far from lying low, springs into action. Drew attempts to flee to Shanghai but is arrested on the plane. Elliott and Portia abscond to a summer share (“I know a place that is far, far away from all of this.” “Our imaginations?” “The Hamptons!”), find themselves roped into babysitting a gaggle of wealthy, towheaded children (“I just hate these rich kids! They don’t listen to us at all!,” Portia complains, oblivious to the obvious correspondence between herself and her charges), dye their own blonde hair Addams Family black in a harebrained attempt to conceal their identities, and end up being taken in by the cops, anyway. Like other works whose central gambit is “friends and a dead body”—Donna Tartt’s genteel “The Secret History”; Danny Boyle’s comically grim “Shallow Grave”; delinquent-teen shockers like Larry Clark’s “Bully” or Tim Hunter’s “River’s Edge”—“Search Party” pits the group against its members. Will the bonds of friendship be robust enough to keep individuals from attempting to save their own skins by admitting the dark secret they swore to keep? Part of the joke in “Search Party,” however, is that, even before committing murder, the characters have rarely, if ever, thought of anyone but themselves. On catching the news of Dory and Drew’s arrest on TV, Chantal goes into a fit, moaning, “What does this mean for me?” And, though the gang’s self-perception largely depends on the distinction they like to make between themselves (cool, attractive cognoscenti) and people like Chantal (corny, sappy duds), her frantic self-absorption, in fact, reflects theirs exactly.
Oblivious narcissists are a great boon to comedy, and “Search Party” largely allows its characters their nutty, egomaniacal foibles, without going too much into their past traumas or family histories. The show occasionally treads on uneven ground during moments in which we are meant to learn something further, and perhaps more typically affecting, about a character’s past—such as when, in the fifth episode, we meet Dory’s Iraqi immigrant parents, who come into town when she goes on trial, and from whom she appears alienated. (Shawkat, too, is the daughter of an Iraqi-immigrant father.) It’s unclear, at such moments, whether we are supposed to understand the character more deeply—embody her viewpoint and identify with her psychology, as we would with a figure in a more conventional show.
What most distinguishes Dory this season, however, is her transformation into a media sensation over the course of her trial. As she sheds the outward hesitancy that typified her character in the show’s earlier seasons, Shawkat plays her as increasingly vampy and self-aggrandizing. (“I just never thought being so known was going to feel so dangerous!” she headily muses to a circle of rapt admirers at an event.) Hagner’s turn, this season, as a born-again seeker who moonlights as a crop-top-wearing pop singer in a church band, and Reynolds’s as a clean-cut heartthrob murderer pursued by crazed female fans, including a flirty juror, are great, as well. And John Early once again delivers a tour-de-force performance as the flamboyant Elliott, whose bitchy self-satisfaction never ceases to pulse with an undercurrent of a jumpy, quasi-hysterical uncertainty. (“Guys, it is what it is. Let’s just drive home and stop at that really good ceviche place in Watermill and just get taken in for questioning, already!”)
But it is the minor characters who just as often steal the show here. Clare McNulty as the pain-in-the-neck crybaby Chantal; Michaela Watkins as a blunt, ambitious prosecutor; Jay Duplass as an amoral theatre-director guru; Chloe Fineman as a rotten-to-the-core conservative TV pundit; Louie Anderson as a snoozy, not-getting-any-younger defense lawyer (“The Chicago Tribune called him the best defense attorney on the East Side of Chicago in 1988!”); and, perhaps especially, Shalita Grant, who gives a real star turn as Dory’s first-time defense attorney, a “thirty and single” pampered-girlboss type. (“It’s, like, bitch, just admit you like to shop,” she mutters, rolling her eyes at Watkins’s no-nonsense, nineties-feminist-style prosecutor.) None of these people are good, but “Search Party” isn’t a standard morality tale. We are not meant, I don’t think, to love or hate the characters, to identify with them or completely reject them. What we can do is enjoy watching as they veritably crackle with kinetic energy. The series remains at its best when it approaches its players’ individualized tics and gestures from a slight remove—its gaze amused, sometimes even a little sympathetic, but, in the end, thoroughly unsentimental.
