Search Party: The Unbearable Whiteness of Being
Are we still in the golden age of television? Surely the mean quality has declined since the finales of those shows that heralded that term screened (The Wire and Sopranos), yet the gold itself still flows with competing streaming services willing to dispense vast amount of cash to commission series after series. Some are good but many aren’t. I suffer from an acute case of second-seasonitis - having been seduced by the initial vision which maintains its grip all the way to the first finale but then losing interest in the inevitable lull that marks the second season. Although there is still gold in them hills - Search Party can withstand its second season and have me coming back for more.
I suspect it was the writers themselves that were suffering from second-seasonitis. That they came to their production company with a tightly written (and plotted) first season but never planned a second. Now in its fourth season I had long since taken for granted that the writers had been making it up as they went along.
This is not a criticism for their lack of foresight. It works. Their full-realised characters inhabit a consistent world and a genre-shift is enough to provide enough chaos to keep them reeling and scrambling in a formula that took me two seasons to understand. Just-in-time plot making is an Agile approach to story making. This is not to say that most writers rooms aren’t a febrile hotpot of wild ideas with looming deadlines but that television is not an engineering project - too much planning can make the experience stale. With its writers brilliant but always on the back foot Search Party may lose its grip on reality and become a Lynch knockoff but it will never become boring.
Genre-shifting as plot generator, still in season 4, is a riot - there are murders, deaths, kidnappings and legal trials. The characters travel through genres like the Disneyland ride It’s a Small World - each a new country a new one. See the land of the Thriller, the Mystery, the Courtroom drama. I’m sure there was an intense debate as to whether the outcome of the courtroom season would take the show into a prison season or not a-la The Night Of. The tone can pivot wildly between seasons and it is surreal and disorientating.
Search Party begins with Dory (Alia Shawkat) as self appointed detective to discover what happened to a former college acquaintance - Chantal Witherbottom. She has vanished but nobody seems to care very much except Dory, her friends are so self-absorbed they barely remember who Chantal was. This lot is a privileged set - they float from party, to brunch, to gallery openings their feet never touching the ground.
Dory’s tenacity is presented as a cloaked instinct to push through this insulated, sedated reality to a bedrock of something real and authentic Chantal is Old Occitan word meaning stone. The world Dory and her friends inhabit is anything but real and authentic. Her friends - fabulously camp Elliot Goss, über-blonde Portia Davenport - provide little relief to Dory, although much comic relief to the viewer. Many a punchline arrives at these two’s reactions in moments of high drama.
These two friends are products of this world drifting through it in bubbles of their own. They are narcissistic and utterly vapid - throwing tantrums in the most dire of situations, when confronted by death and violence wailing “What about meeee?!”
Dory’s ex-boyfriend Drew is the realest of the party. Looking like a Ralph Lauren model with the best hair since 90210, he experiences closest to genuine emotion which is to say something that will outlive the next tantrum. Drew understands the existential nightmare that lies in wait in the basement below the sprawling mansion of privilege but he refuses to go down there. Portia and Elliot on the other hand have even been to the ground floor.
In the fourth season after a string of catastrophes that would make anyone question the nature of existence, Drew finally asks both Elliot and Portia if they wonder what it’s all about. Elliot thinks for a moment with an expression that conveys deep thought then replies it’s like a conversation someone would have in college. Even though it doesn’t read so - it’s hilarious thanks to Elliot’s delivery and another squandered moment where the penny could drop.
A primary thrust of early Search Party (the first two seasons) is this sort of parody of millennials. Each member of Dory’s set is happy to check their privilege but there are consequences to rejecting it. The writers have picked this moment of acute intergenerational tension for their comment exquisitely. The older generation is hardly let off the hook though. With the exception of Dory’s own struggling immigrant parents, white boomers in Search Party are even less rooted in the real world - presented as late stage version of their children - what happens when the cocktail of booze, sedatives and antidepressants is imbibed over the course of decades. Good news for the kids wary of their inheritance - none of this ever seems to impact on their wealth, their immaculate appearance or their frictionless existence.
Back to the millennials though - Dory’s group pay lip service to any social causes but this arrives more like brand recognition than a genuine social conscience. It is a like rather than a genuine comment. Acknowledgement, as acknowledgement will, comes without any personal investment. We see Portia and Elliot’s intricately absorbed system of alliances melt away at the first challenge. In one brilliant turn Elliot is happy to compromise all his morals and become a conservative television pundit - denouncing the queerness that is the foundation of his identity throughout the show.
Perhaps the only character with any grist to his mill is Julian - another of Dory’s ex-boyfriend. He recognises the group for all their vapidity. That he is black and a journalist is important - he seems to be in touch with a degree of authenticity and values truth in a way that is far out of reach to the other characters. In other words the privilege to be vapid without consequences is presented as white.
And then there is the question of wealth. I have never seen a show that has so firmly convinced that money will have no meaning as Search Party. The pursuit of it is never a primary motive for any of the characters. Almost all are very well off - immaculately made up and fashionably dressed (berets off to wardrobe). The characters have jobs but the work seems untethered to money and will never provide genuine meaning. None of them have real careers.
It’s Dory’s story around which the show is woven. She is the actor - as in providing most of the action. She is punished for grasping for something solid represents what happens when she questions the social order in that world - when she reaches through the screen onto which the never-ending series of parties and hungover brunches is projected and tries to reach something, as they say, ‘real’.
Although this existential nightmare is not really the point - this is not a heavy handed sermon and we are allowed to enjoy it, to become light-headed in the champagne absurdity and become complicit in the whole affair. We do care but there are so many colourful distractions and genre trope recognition that we become a little lost and intoxicated - and the “caring” is reduced to a valium induced vagueness, an dim awareness that we had to do something but cannot for the life of us remember what it was.