In 1936, to make ends meet, F. Scott Fitzgerald published a series of melancholic essays in Esquire that would come to be known as “The Crack-Up,” in which he described his experience of becoming mentally undone. For him, and for others who had lived through the preceding decades’ dual blows of war and financial ruin, something inside had been permanently shattered, he believed. “There is another sort of blow that comes from within,” he wrote, “that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”
“The Crack-Up” would be a fitting title for the fourth season of “Search Party,” the madcap series about a group of self-indulgent millennials who drift their way into covering up a murder. In the penultimate episode of the season (and be forewarned, spoilers ahead), Elliott Goss (John Early), an extravagant fashion victim, sits stranded on a highway with two friends in the fictional rural town of Babyfoot, Massachusetts, lamenting his terrible decisions. They are trying to find their friend Dory Sief (Alia Shawkat), a killer turned kidnapping victim, who has been locked in the basement of a nearby mansion, the captive of a deranged stalker who dresses in drag as his aunt. Elliott has sold out and become a right-wing pundit on the news network he works for; he even agreed to lend his name to a new line of bedazzled handguns. But the factory making them has recently exploded. “We’re all so fucking lost!” he says. “It’s like we’re a lost generation!” But, where Fitzgerald described a generation unmoored because they had fought in the trenches and been forced to see too much, the wayward youth of “Search Party” have suffered a crack-up of their own making. When the show begins, the characters have seen entirely too little. They are underemployed and understimulated, self-obsessed but not self-directed. And so they create their own own trenches to leap into, just to have a story to tell.
When “Search Party” premièred on TBS, in the fall of 2016, it seemed as if it might be yet another blithe entrant into the “Entitled millennials, what will they do next?” genre of television comedy. The show—created by the writing partners Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers (who now serve as showrunners), along with the comedian Michael Showalter—débuted just months after “Girls” ended its six-season run, and introduced another ragtag quartet of Brooklyn brunchers whose lives don’t look exactly like they had hoped. Elliott was trying to launch a luxury-water company. Portia Davenport (Meredith Hagner), an attention-starved actress, couldn’t hold on to a role to save her life. Drew Gardner (John Reynolds), a finance bro in basic Bonobos, hated his job on Wall Street. And Dory, his live-in girlfriend, was perhaps the most lost of the bunch—eager to do something valuable with her life but unable to find a toehold. But then she decided to go in search of a college classmate, a prissy poet named Chantal Witherbottom (Clare McNulty), who’d gone missing, and the show veered pleasingly off-piste—it became a propulsive mystery-comedy, a live-action “Scooby Doo,” pressing the familiar theme of millennial aimlessness into the shape of an amateur detective story. As Dory pursued the case with increasing obsessiveness, Drew, Elliott, and Portia followed along, thinking that her newfound sense of self-actualization might rub off on them.
The whole affair could have ended as a Noël Coward-esque farce, with a good laugh had by all. Chantal, whom the friends eventually tracked to Montreal, did not get abducted or join a cult; she simply decided to go “off the grid” while squatting in a rich friend’s vacation home. The search could have led Dory to find her true self. Instead, the creepy private eye Keith Powell (Ron Livingston) showed up at Chantal’s escape pad, and he and Dory tussled, and Drew, in an attempt to defend her, grabbed a marble obelisk from the foyer and hit Keith over the head. With that fatal thwack, the show shape-shifted again—the silly, dead-end noir was now a tale of murder. In Season 2, the gang attempts to cover up the crime, and when a nosy neighbor named April (an acidly funny Phoebe Tyers) threatens to expose them, Dory finds that she is capable of killing intentionally, too. Season 3 is “Search Party” ’s courtroom blockbuster, as Dory goes on trial and becomes enormously famous as a result—an Amanda Knox for the matcha-latte set—and discovers that she likes playing the part. (The season aired in early 2020, after a three-year hiatus and a move to HBO Max.) Through it all, Dory clings to the belief that she is a good person. The show obliterates the cozy notion—pushed by so many other shows about navel-gazing young people—that what ultimately matters is good intentions, that what really counts is who you are inside. But it also depicts how members of a generation prone to fantasies of grandeur can fantasize their way out of any form of self-reckoning, even for the most reprehensible actions. They choose money, fame, disassociation, and neurasthenia over accountability, every time.
In Season 4, Dory finally faces a reckoning of sorts. When the season begins, she awakens in chains, her head shaved, wearing only a white tank top and sweatpants. She is not in a prison cell, where she deserves to be, but in a far more bizarre kind of hell: a padlocked basement in a Massachusetts Victorian home, where her stalker, a pampered “twink” named Chip (Cole Escola), is keeping her in a lair fashioned as an exact simulacrum of her Brooklyn apartment. From there, pulling inspiration from films such as “Misery” and “The Silence of the Lambs,” the season goes into a full-on claustrophobic psychological horror.
The inbred scion of a snack-cake tycoon, Chip is a little bit Norman Bates and a little bit Kathy Bates, a demurely violent loner wearing a grotesque procession of Aunt Lylah’s mink coats and curly wigs. He is desperate for companionship, and convinced of Dory’s innocence. He’s winging the whole abduction thing. But the torture he subjects his captive to is more diabolical than he realizes: He forces Dory to literally live with herself, to undergo an immersion therapy in her own nightmarish life, complete with dolls that he has remade to look like Elliott, Portia, and Drew. He feeds Dory a unvaried diet of soy nuggets and rarely allows her to shower; when he does, he stays in the bathroom singing an off-key rendition of Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart.” A nosy neighbor—played by Ann Dowd, doing her best “I would like to speak to the manager” schtick (the show excels at kooky guest appearances)—makes the mistake of dropping by to put up Christmas decorations and winds up dead. Late in the season, Chip finally offers Dory a release from her suffering: using some makeshift hypnotism, plus a drug cocktail plucked from Lylah’s medicine cabinet, he manages to convince Dory—using a miniature tableau that he has constructed of the Montreal crime scene—that she is a blameless woman named Stephanie, and outfits her in a garish blonde wig. Dory’s only moments of happiness in the season are when she forgets who she is entirely.
While Dory is having her identity refigured and her brain scrambled, the others are busy performing evermore alienated versions of themselves. Drew runs away to a Disneyland-like amusement park in Florida, where he hides out in a lion costume and goes by a different name. Portia auditions to play herself in a made-for-television movie about the court case but is stunt-cast in the role of Dory instead, and then gets fired for failing to convincingly access the character’s dark side. “Look at me and my stupid fat choices!” Elliott says of his right-wing-punditry gambit. “I’m like a person playing a person playing a person!” The only character who finds an “authentic” self might be Chantal, who writes a memoir, “Imperfect Ten,” while tripping on a handful of her brother-in-law’s “Ideas” pills. An Oprah-like talk-show host named Wilma (Lillias White) lauds the book as “somewhere between self-help and a manifesto on how to live without shame, and without awareness” (though, in fairness, Wilma is under the mistaken impression that the book was written by a child.) At one point, Chantal sees a missing-person poster for Dory—the same type of sign that had led Dory to go looking for her. Chantal barely pays it any attention. The rest of the group sets out to find Dory, half-heartedly. “I guess we have to save her,” Portia says when they’re sitting by the side of the road. “Do we?” Elliott asks.
The season is ingeniously structured—a ravel of assumed and mistaken identities, body doubles, brief encounters, shoddy disguises, and role reversals that turn the story into a cockeyed photo negative of itself. One of the show’s sharpest skewers of the solipsistic, clog-clomping Brooklyn mentality is carried off by its costume design. Hagner, as Portia, channels the dippy breeziness of a young Goldie Hawn, wearing chicken feathers and gigantic animal pelts even during the day. Elliott’s wardrobe, ridiculous in both color and proportions (and as such, the subject of many a listicle), includes, in Season 4, an oversized striped bathrobe worn as a winter coat. The writing on “Search Party” is brilliant at parodying corporate jargon and therapy-speak, how the language of self-help can be twisted into absurd pretzels of self-justification. “We have to start taking more responsibility for how little responsibility we’ve actually had in our lives,” Elliott tells Portia and Drew. One of the greatest scenes is a farcical car chase in which each party believes that it is chasing the other, and each is mistaken about who’s in the other car. They end up in a traffic circle, going round and round, each car waiting for the other to take an exit—a search party that goes nowhere.
“Search Party” has not yet been renewed for a fifth season, and, if the Season 4 finale was the series’ end, it’s a worthy one. Dory, once the aggressor, has become the victim; once the rescuer, she has become the missing person. But—as we see in a twist at the end of the ninth episode—even that role is one she chose for herself. In the finale, Dory is a ghost at her own funeral. The house she was trapped in burned down, and apparently she didn’t make it out. This phantom Dory looks on as her friends eulogize her. Portia, wearing a silver flapper headdress, like an ersatz Daisy Buchanan, rambles incoherently about the futility of understanding oneself or others. “We don’t really know why we are the way we are,” she says. “But we are the way that we are and that’s the way that we are.” (“Are you gonna clap?” she asks when she’s done.) Elliott gives a rousing speech about all that Dory taught him by being a “lying, manipulative bitch.” Drew plays an off-key love song on a ukulele. As the service goes on, more Dories begin to show up. There’s the smug Season 3 Dory, in her prim trial outfit. There’s the calculating Season 2 Dory, in the red dress she was wearing when she killed April. And there’s the hopeful, misguided Season 1 Dory, in her schlumpy tweed coat. Each the star of a different show, they look on as Dory’s friends try their best to give her story some sense of closure and redemption.
It is the first time that the “Search Party” writers seem to wrap a plotline up in a bow. In “The Crack-Up,” Fitzgerald concludes that the members of his generation who had survived “had made some sort of clean break”—that in order to move forward, they had to cut ties with their burdensome pasts. Watching her own funeral, Dory seems to have, at last, attained this kind of escape velocity. But the show wouldn’t offer her such easy grace. The finale ends with a tinny phonograph recording of “Me and My Shadow,” Al Lynn’s haunting ditty, from 1927, about a lonely, fractured soul. No matter how many personas the “Search Party” characters don and doff, they have to live with what they have done.
