"Search Party" is good

We like to watch TV, don't we?

A few minutes ago, the last minute of “Search Party’s” fourth season blipped off of my screen. It was strange. The whole show is strange. I don’t know whether it’s the length of the normal buzz cycle, or the ever-shrinking number of people paid to recap TV shows, but I didn’t hear a ton about this season. Not compared to the third, which picked up the story and shoved it onto HBO Max, the almost disturbingly purple streaming service, which could be accessed by people who never paid for basic cable.

The only substantial review I noticed was in The New Yorker, and the overlap between that magazine’s readers and the audience for this show is likely total - I can see the back issues piling up on viewers’ IKEA coffee tables. This is a smart show with moments of brilliance and plot holes that are treated like jokes. One character who needed to be written off got an NDA payoff that funded his escape to Brazil; a political subplot that never made sense was handled in the same scene. Everything fits, eventually, if ridiculously.

But the addictive thing is this: The show resets its genre every season, without actually changing its tone. Don’t ask me how. Season one is a satire of pampered millennials who go on a search for a missing classmate because one of them (Dori, played by Alia Shawkat) lacks meaning. Season two pivots to a conspiracy noir, like “Detour,” in which characters who’ve accidentally committed murder desperately try to avoid accountability. (If you’ve seen “Detour” I probably spoiled two plot points.)

Season three turned over again, becoming a ludicrous trial drama and smart-enough satire of instant celebrity. It introduced an obsessive fan, Chip, who stalked Dori, and the season ended with a soap opera twist: Presumed dead, Chip kidnaps Dori, shaves her head, and traps her in a location we’ve never seen before.

I think a lot about “masscult” and “midcult,” and how a device like a murder plot can support both a direct-to-video piece of shit and a Sundance winner that gets an Oscar for an actress who played against type. The fourth season of this show was pulpy, with details I’d mostly heard about in daytime TV. Hypnosis! Cross-dressing! Inbreeding! Acid trips! False identities!

Nearly every character is an asshole, but not in a cheap way. Dori’s journey, which I’m leaving vague here, occurs without any attempt to make her sympathetic. She’s a sociopath, who believes she deserves a good life no matter what she does. That changes in season four, as Dori undergoes a sort of willing ego death - again, this is a comedy - and submits to a kidnapper’s programming because, we later discover, of the revelation that she had broken her old life and didn’t want it back.

Anyway: It’s good. Watch it. If you find it tedious after 60 minutes or so, you probably won’t like it, because at that point you haven’t fallen for the characters and you and I don’t understand each other.