How did I not know this show existed before a month ago? Co-created by Michael Showalter? Starring Alia Shawkat? A cavalcade of recurring stars, including, but not at all limited to, Chelsea Peretti, R. L. Stine, Parker Posey, Jeff Goldblum, Michaela Watkins, Christine Taylor, Louie Anderson, JOHN WATERS?

And there are five seasons? Oh boy!

The Premise

The show focuses on four millennial college friends living in New York City. Alia Shawkat plays Dory Sief, OUR “PROTAGONIST”. John Reynolds plays Drew Gardner, Dory’s awkward, but well-meaning, boyfriend. John Early plays Elliott Goss, the flamboyant and criminally self-involved philanthropist, sort of. Meredith Hagner plays Portia Davenport, the flighty, aspiring actress.

Oh yeah, and Michael Showalter is in it for, like, three scenes as Drew’s boss Max!

Mike Sho in the role he was born to play!

Dory works as a personal assistant for a rich, absent-minded woman, Gail, played by the aforementioned Christine Taylor. Dory finds her post-college life completely unfulfilling and dull, punctuated by her lack of engagement into her relationships, and thus strives for any excuse to find meaning in her pathetic existence!

Meaning is dropped in her lap when she becomes obsessed with the missing person posters of an old college acquaintance posted all over town, Chantal Witherbottom (Clare McNulty). Believed to be dead by most of Chantal’s friends and family, Dory’s obsession grows and grows after she thinks she sees Chantal in a restaurant, after she runs into people that may be leads into Chantal’s disappearance, after she discovers a creepy cult (which includes Parker Posey), and after she runs into a so-called private investigator named Keith (Ron Livingston) who aids her in her mission.

This might be a Chotchkie’s. Is Jennifer Aniston working today?

This is a dark comedy, so a lot of fucked up stuff happens along the way! It’s wonderful.

My Half-Baked Thoughts

I used to think Alia Shawkat was cute as hell in Arrested Development (and that’s fine, I was 16 at the time and she was 15 so you can go fuck yourself). Besides Season 4 of Arrested Development, which I also thought she was cute in (and that’s fine, I was 25 at the time and she was 24 so you can go fuck yourself), I haven’t seen her act in anything else. She’s always been Maeby to me. Now I get to see her something other than the sociopathic troublemaker that she was in Arrested Development, and she’s cute in this too. Go fuck yourself.

Dory and Keith on a mission

Besides the fact that my own wife looks a little bit like Shawkat, Dory’s personality matches too: macabre and way too persistent about business that has nothing to do with her! I don’t mind saying it, she’s not reading any of this anyway. Dory is told many times by her friends to give it all a rest as the season progresses, but since she literally has nothing else going on in her life she makes it her sole mission to find Chantal and prove to everyone that she isn’t crazy after seeing her in that restaurant.

I’m always on board with character-driven over plot-driven fiction, and Search Party excels in this area. Almost everything revolves around Dory gathering information about Chantal’s disappearance, but the meat of the story is really about how these friends interact with one another. And it’s pretty poorly! Dory’s ex-boyfriend Julian (Brandon Micheal Hall) is kind of a dick, but he’s mature when he wants to be. Especially when it comes to interacting with Drew, who tends to be the more jealous and insecure one of the two. Elliott is a total self-absorbed dipshit who is also kind of dick, but he’s not self-aware, and the whole story about him lying about his teenage cancer is VERY FUNNY if you let yourself enjoy a character who lies about having cancer!

I ‘UNNO WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT! I HAD THE CANCER, I SWEAR IT ON MY MOTHER’S PISS-SOAKED GRAVE! SEE? *displays cancer certificate of authenticity*

What I like about a show like this is that one has no idea how far the drama is going to really go. In these early episodes, before you really understand the worldbuilding and the momentum of the plot, the whole vibe is sinister enough to avoid the campy direction of “these stakes are high heh heh but not really because it’s too self-unaware for you to take it seriously”. I mean, this is TBS so it can’t go too far, but it’s pretty good at making it SEEM like it COULD go too far! Even if it might, it’s undercut a little, of course, by the ridiculous humor of it all. There’s a entire episode where Dory hosts a dinner party in order to grill Chantal’s ex-boyfriend for information. Griffin Newman’s performance as the mentally unstable Gavin is absolutely brilliant and chilling. A picture perfect representation of the young, scorned American white male who would most definitely shoot up a YWCA if he was nudged hard enough off the brink by vengeful anger. The actual string of dinner party scenes is my favorite sequence in Season 1. Gavin’s attempts to be smooth with Portia, his still-smoldering college crush, are pathetic, hilarious, and off-putting all at once.

Oh look, it’s the guy everyone went to college with. The one who would throw a deafening tantrum in the dormitory halls if a girl didn’t want to come into his room at 2am.

Dory’s journey toward the truth is fraught with unsettling turns. The whole episode about the cult is bizarre, and stands out as the most humorless episode of the season. Dory’s inappropriate budding romance with Keith is an awful train wreck, especially during scenes where he’s yelling at his ex-wife over the phone or when his romantic advances are creepy as shit. There’s a scene with Chantal’s old roommate, a young woman who entertains men in her apartment with strange fetish performances involving baby clothes and bunnies.

And all the while, her friends couldn’t care less about Dory’s pursuits. They barely want to be involved, but in a cast of narcissistic characters, Dory wears the crown. Under duress, she drags them all down with her. She becomes so invested in getting to the answer that all these clear signs to mind her own business, all these frequent outs to just forget the whole thing and move on her life, they’re never taken into real consideration. She gets in too deep. The only way out is to keep pushing through.

And the end of the season finale is a fucked up comedy of errors.

Worth the Watch?

Yes, absolutely. I’ve read some comments that the whole show from beginning to end is brilliant. I’ve also read some comments that suggest to watch Season 1 and avoid the rest. I’m going to keep going and see how that all shakes out! Living on the edge over here, that’s for sure.