Review: Search Party Returns, Finally, for a Biting Third Season - Vanity Fair

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It’s gratifying that, three seasons in, Search Party keeps finding new ways for its self-absorbed characters to make fools of themselves. The first season’s stakes were so high, and its protagonist Dory’s (Alia Shawkat) transformation so dramatic, that it was difficult to imagine how the show, from showrunners Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers, could feasibly continue the story. The second season felt a little muted by comparison—but that was the point. Dory, Drew (John Reynolds), Portia (Meredith Hagner), and Elliott (John Early) clung to keeping up appearances, even as guilt and complicity frayed their calm.

Now, in its third season premiering on HBOMax (the first two seasons, which originally aired on TBS, are there too), Search Party is both over-the-top and fantastically understated. It simmers with the high drama set in motion by its first season finale, but is set in an airless world that has no space for moral reckoning.

The third season turns Search Party’s attention to the criminal justice system, with a murder trial led by a district attorney (Michaela Watkins) who is refreshingly inured to Dory’s charms. Drew’s lawyer is an incompetent played by Louie Anderson, while Dory’s is a media-savvy operator who seems to have weaponized vocal fry (played by Shalita Grant). The characters are not in new places, exactly, this season, so much as they are continuing on the terrible path they started out on in season one, bargaining away their integrity for a chance at exposure. The only character who seems truly troubled by what he’s become is Drew—who is in the difficult position of having his fate inextricably tied to Dory’s.

The blasé Brooklyn in the show—nestled in a manipulative, mendacious media landscape—currently feels like a throwback to a different era, a snapshot of a time before a global pandemic and a nationwide movement. But rather than making the show’s atmosphere irrelevant, the discrepancy between now and then emphasizes the whole scope of how we got here—not just one narcissistic real estate mogul’s entree into the White House, but also a culture that amply rewards appearance over truth, especially when that appearance is on-trend. “Truthiness,” that term coined on The Colbert Report, is the subject of Search Party season three’s explorations: What semblance of fact is more convincing than fact? What appearance of authenticity is more authentic than the real? With a delicate touch—one that spends a lot of time luxuriating in flippant, frivolous dialogue—Search Party reveals its too-familiar characters for the charlatans they are.

The show has already filmed a fourth season—which is good to know, because like the first two, the third is an easy marathon watch. Almost too easy. If you’re like me, you’ll be eight episodes in, enjoying all the subtlety, when you’re thrown into a mild panic by realizing there’s only two episodes left. There’s something a little insubstantial about Search Party; it’s as light and crisp as a wafer, and disappears almost as soon as you take it in. Perhaps it really is the voice of a generation.

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Review: Search Party Returns, Finally, for a Biting Third Season - Vanity Fair

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