“Brooklyn, New York, is under siege,” says a TV news anchor in one of the final episodes of HBO’s fifth and final season of Search Party, “by an unidentified contagious personality disorder.” This joke just shouldn’t land. Brooklyn and its obliviously self-parodic gentrifiers, call them hipsters, millennials, zoomers, creatives, the wretched refuse of Oberlin and Bard, are the lowest-hanging fruit in the comedy orchard. Not to mention that the “contagious personality disorder” in question is an apocalyptic zombie outbreak brought on by mass poisoning. The zom-com peaked over a decade ago with movies such as Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, back when millennials were still young, and it seems doomed to shuffle around forever like a wasted party guest who won’t leave. Are we really still doing this?
But Search Party has been clowning on urban millennials for five seasons, since 2016 (the first two seasons aired on TBS, the other three on HBO), and it has done its clowning with consistent imagination and panache. It doesn’t lean on its occasional cliches and tropes so much as force them to dance at gunpoint. Thus the zombie plot is really a dig at the laziness that made “zombie apocalypse” such a ubiquitous premise for the past two decades. Thus the oddly dated Brooklyn jokes are, by Season Five, as much at the expense of hacky generational criticism as of the vaping, swiping, brunching, hustling, self-absorbed, teletherapy- and Xanax-dependent Avocado Toast Generation. Search Party really does have something for everyone, you see, and that something is razor-sharp cultural criticism.
What, for the uninitiated, is it all about? Search Party bills itself as a mystery, but the titular search is, with apologies to Viktor Frankl, a millennial’s search for meaning. Four friends from college are making their way, sort of, in the big city. Elliott (John Early) is a flamboyant grifter — he pretends to be a cancer survivor for clout — who looks like he raided Bjork’s wardrobe. His constant companion is Portia (Meredith Hagner), a blond, big-eyed, squeaky-voiced, emotionally labile sylph who isn’t a Latina but plays one on a network police procedural. Drew (John Reynolds), rangy, bespectacled, and easily led, is the archetypal mediocre white man. His girlfriend, Dory (Alia Shawkat), a rich woman’s personal assistant, is the dim star this group orbits — but like many dim stars, she is about to explode.
In Season One, sad-sack Dory finds an unlikely source of purpose in the search for a missing college acquaintance, Chantal (Clare McNulty). Though they barely remember the girl — even “acquaintance” is a stretch — Dory’s friends are roped into the amateur investigation, which entangles them with an unhinged obsessive (Rosie Perez) and a real private investigator (Ron Livingston). They get in so far over their heads that Season Two is spent covering up the accidental murder that concludes Season One. Season Three is a courtroom drama. Season Four is a horror movie, which finds Dory acquitted of murder but confined to a basement by a deranged admirer. And not just any basement — a Red Grooms-style cardboard and papier-mache replica of her own bedroom.
Search Party’s cast over five seasons includes nearly 350 people, and it is to comic actors what Justified and Sons of Anarchy were to bearded, grizzled character actors. They’re all here: Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Wallace Shawn, Louie Anderson, Parker Posey, Griffin Dunne, Jay Duplass, Chloe Fineman, Chelsea Peretti, Busy Philipps, and many more. There are cameos by young adult horror writer R.L. Stine, Instagram star Benito Skinner, and High Maintenance’s Ben Sinclair, who dies hilariously at the end. If Search Party’s lurid plot, with its byzantine intrigues and nested surprises, is half the fun, the other half is seeing so many weird and singular characters assembled in one place. At its best, the show shares the carnivalesque atmosphere of 30 Rock.
This final season explores the “search” concept in its most exalted form, the search for spiritual awakening. Dory, having died at the end of Season Four, rises from the dead in the back of an ambulance. “Do you mean dead like when people say, ‘OK, I’m literally dead?’” Elliott asks. “Or dead like you’re literally dead?” Dory, now suffering from delusions of deification, is institutionalized, but she manages, through the cunning and recklessness she’s cultivated over four seasons, to gain her freedom, find a following, and catch the attention of techno-utopian mogul Tunnel Quinn (Jeff Goldblum). With the help of a team of social media influencers, they set out to replicate Dory’s enlightenment in a marketable, consumable form. They will either save the world or, true to Dory’s track record and character arc, destroy it utterly.
It’s an uneven season, at least relative to the brilliance that preceded it. None of the fault lies in the cast. Early continues to be one of the most gifted and expressive physical comedians around, and Shawkat gives her most unsettling performance as a traumatized person in the grip of religious mania. A bizarre love triangle connecting Dory to Portia and Drew, now her brainwashed acolytes, furnishes some of Hagner’s and Reynolds’s best comic turns. But the writing is often a letdown. The show runs into the danger that faces all satire in the 21st century — that it isn’t different enough from its targets to make itself felt. Dory’s team of social media influencers should be Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but as in real life, they just seem like emotionally broken drama club kids. Goldblum’s Bezos-Musk caricature, Tunnel Quinn, is a charlatan, of course. Enlightenment can’t really come from a pill. To believe otherwise is dangerous hubris. It all feels pretty obvious.
Luckily, a weak season of Search Party is better than a strong season of most shows. Its devotion to absurdism and chaos, and its readiness to escalate the craziness no matter how far it’s gone already, is proof of the confidence and creativity of showrunners Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers. Why not throw in a hostage crisis? Why not an exploding school bus like some big-budget Christopher Nolan set piece? Why not have an episode that serves no purpose except to burlesque Stephen King’s It? It’s a joy to watch the show take risks without worrying too much about whether they’ll pay off — and, as a bonus, they typically do.
Something must be said, finally, for the show’s fundamental darkness, its pessimism about the sort of people that modern life is producing. The boredom and insecurity that impel Dory and her friends to wreak their careless havoc feel very true to life. They want to be seen, to be recognized, to have some measurable effect on things, and often, they seem indifferent or oblivious to the cost. “The world is ending because of me” is a line with many interpretations. It should be delivered with horror, but here it has an air of childlike wonder: I made something happen. I must be important. Deprived of opportunities to be good, Search Party’s youth have settled for clout, reach, impactfulness. The show’s final shot, of Dory examining a whole wall of missing person flyers, makes it pretty clear where all of that leads.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
