Search Party finds the perfect way to wrap up by jumping the shark
It’s nearly impossible to take stock of Search Party’s fifth and final season, which lands on HBO Max this week, without revisiting its entire, wild, genre-switching, network-hopping run," says Jessica Toomer. "The show launched as an interrogation of millennial anxieties, set in the nebulous of hipster culture at the time (Brooklyn) and filled with sly, biting commentary on the self-entitlement and, simultaneously, the very real dread inherited by a generation raised in the post-Y2K internet boom. They brunched, they stalked their frenemies on social media platforms, and they found a misguided sense of purpose in hunting down a familiar face that wound up on a missing person’s poster.
Search Party They fed each other’s narcissism and delusions of grandeur, but they also filled voids in each other’s lives – ones left by absentee and overbearing parents, needy boyfriends, and unfulfilling career paths.
All of that still rings true for the show’s final hurrah – a trippy Magical Mystery Tour of cults, tech gods, influencer culture, and an apocalyptic event or two. For any other show, this amalgam of competing story threads would probably prove too much to handle. But Search Party’s final magic trick is to take a term we normally reserve for shows that completely lose the plot by their last season and transform it into a kind of weirdly aspirational goalpost for the next-gen of dark comedy on TV. In other words,
Search Party’s final run purposefully 'jumps the shark' and, honestly, we couldn’t think of a better way for it to end.
Search Party's final season is bananas: "The Season 4 finale of Search Party was arguably—and I've argued it before—a perfect way to end the series. Dory (Alia Shawkat), the millennial sleuth turned murderer, had been kidnapped and was presumed dead thanks to a blaze orchestrated by her captor (Cole Escola) and his overbearing mother (Susan Sarandon)," says Esther Zuckerman. "Dory's friends gather for a funeral, which is attended by her fractured spirit: All the different versions of Dory we've met over the course of the series show up. It's funny and bizarrely moving. But then in the last moments of the episode, Dory, on a stretcher, gasps to life. So what do showrunners Charles Rogers and Sarah-Violet Bliss do with that blank slate? They blow it all up. The fifth and final season of Search Party is, frankly, bananas. It takes a ridiculous, ballsy, massive swerve, keeping the same familiar characters but plunging them into a quasi-alt-universe version of the Brooklyn they had previously inhabited. What once started as a comment on the kind of self-obsessed gentrifies you'd spot at brunch in Greenpoint has evolved into an unnerving dystopia, rooted in the real world but disconnected from it."
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