This piece contains spoilers for Search Party
The beginning of the “Prestige TV” era, which ran roughly from the late 90s until the mid-2010s, was popularly characterized by landmark television that focused on complex antihero lead characters played by high-caliber actors in narratives that reflected contemporary sentiment. The “Big Three” of the era, The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad fit these attributes to a T. While television has largely moved away from the antihero lead character (recent hits Stranger Things, The Crown, and This Is Us prove as such), it’s the unassuming HBO Max comedy Search Party that hearkens back to that era in a surprising way. Search Party’s Dory Sief (Alia Shawkat) fits the mold of the “Prestige TV”-era lead character perfectly, and deserves as much praise as now classic television characters Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White.
The first season of Search Party is a sleight of hand. The season sets up the series to be a straightforward comedy thriller, with millennial Dory enlisting her friends in an attempt to find missing college acquaintance Chantal and in turn give herself a purpose in life. But a surprising, preventable death at the end of the season reveals the show for what it truly is: a character study of people sick with delusion and seemingly limitless self-involvement. Dory has no idea who she is or who she wants to be, and this lack of self-definition leaves her open to debilitating self-centeredness, which peeks out throughout the season before fully being unleashed in the second season, as she attempts to hide all evidence of (what she’s now referring to as) murder.
Throughout the series, leading to the most recent season finale, Dory’s identity changes periodically to protect herself from her guilt, whether it’s from the eyes of the law in the third season or crazed stalker turned kidnapper Chip (Cole Escola) in the fourth season. She’s consistently lied to the relatives and friends of the deceased, maintained her innocence in court despite knowing she’s guilty, and even murdered again, in the case of a vindictive neighbor who attempts to blackmail the group with evidence of the earlier murder. Indicative of the archetypal antihero, these changes in identity underline her belief that she’s ultimately good and deserves to not have her life be negatively affected by the repercussions of her actions, even as her subsequent actions make her life worse and worse, which is the underlying tragic farce of Search Party.
What really sells the tragedy of Search Party is the cast. While the ensemble is great across the board, it’s Shawkat as Dory that is the true standout. Shawkat has always been an interesting actor, going from stealing scenes at a young age in Arrested Development to turning in scene-stealing supporting performances in movies as wide-ranging as Whip It, Green Room, and 20th Century Women. Shawkat is so charming in her performance that the viewer even begins to make excuses for Dory’s behavior despite her going beyond the pale early on in the series. Her likability taps into the type of parasocial relationships that people tend to develop with prestige TV characters, who generally skew more realistic than the average TV character. Shawkat plays Dory as someone so desperately clinging to this idea of her inherent goodness even as it’s clearly eroded away, and it’s as disturbing to witness as it is sad.
This internal push and pull finally gives as she reverts to pure animal instinct when imprisoned by Chip in the fourth season. There’s no more pretense, she’s willing to cross any moral line to survive now. It’s a startling turn that contrasts with the material Shawkat was given earlier in the series, and it takes an even more startling turn when she’s effectively hypnotized and made to forget her actions by Chip, becoming the blank slate she’s always wanted to be. Shawkat rises to every challenge the show presents her, and never loses sight of Dory as a character.
What’s most troubling about Dory is that, at the end of the day, she’s intensely relatable. It’s no accident that the aforementioned “Prestige TV” shows reflected the time in which they were made. That’s what made them so engrossing: from The Sopranos’ focus on the existential dread of the then upcoming 21st century, to Mad Men’s depiction of 60s political upheaval mirroring the social progressivism of the Obama era, to Breaking Bad’s subversive commentary on the state of Bush-era healthcare. Search Party functions as an acute reflection of the millennial condition in the late 2010’s: people that came of age with 9/11 and the Great Recession propelled into an aimless adulthood hampered by student loans and a shrinking job market. It’s this aimlessness that leaves the characters open to the pitfalls of entitlement and self-obsession: avoiding any sense of consequence, extensive focus on creating a “brand”, using newfound fame to become an influencer.
The ease in which one can fall into this self-made hell is where Search Party is at its most incisive. Why wouldn’t you coast off the fame of your much publicized criminal court case like Dory? Why wouldn’t you star in a movie depiction of your own crime-filled life like Portia (Meredith Hagner)? Why wouldn’t you rebrand yourself as a conservative so that you can keep your high-paying media job like Elliott (John Early)? The answer to all of those questions is “because you have a working moral code.” You watch the series and you laugh and cringe because you either see a bit of yourself in the characters, or you just saw someone exactly like them trend on Twitter for all the wrong reasons.
In the final season of The Sopranos, in the aftermath of his most heinous action of the series, Tony Soprano takes peyote. After staring at the sky and seeing a flash, he yells “I get it!”, an epiphany similar to Dory saying “I saw everything” at the end of the fourth season, after witnessing a dream funeral for herself while unconscious from narrowly avoiding death from smoke inhalation. It’s this moment of realization that’s become a trope for antiheroes, like Don’s last scene in the Mad Men finale, or Walter’s confession to his wife in the Breaking Bad finale. Like these characters, it’s both in character and very dire that it takes such horrific events for Dory to finally reach a sense of peace and understanding, and even then in both her and Tony’s case it’s ultimately left up to the viewer to figure out exactly what they’ve realized in that moment. But that’s always been the appeal of witnessing the great antiheroes of television’s past: gazing into the abyss just long enough to recognize some sort of shape.
