Search Party began in 2016 the way you might expect a satire of urban, hipster millennials to begin: at brunch.
There was Alia Shawkat’s Dory, an underemployed post-grad meandering in search of a purpose. John Early’s Elliott, embodying the character of “quippy gay” in the friend group, described his profession as “I just like projects.” John Reynolds’ Drew was the swoon-inducing blank slate familiar to anyone who’s spent time living off the L train in Brooklyn. And Meredith Hagner’s Portia was one of the most unique concoctions of all, a bleeding-heart narcissist.
Over mimosas, they gossip over the disappearance of a former classmate they barely knew, seeing performative concern as an opportunity for both a purpose and attention. They tweet about the “sweet girl” who has gone missing.
The show was a sharply observant depiction of wayward millennials that actually had respect for their journeys, insufferable as they might seem, instead of just making fun of them. But mimosas and avocado-toast discourse were just gateway drugs to the trippy path Search Party would careen down over the next two seasons.
There was a murder, a cover-up, and an investigation. Then another murder and a trial, followed by a media frenzy—and a made-for-TV movie about it all. Season four picks up with the latest jaw-dropping twist: Dory has been kidnapped by The Twink.
That alone is evidence enough that the series hasn’t lost its absurdist humor or sense of mischief, even as it has hurtled toward being, improbably, one of the darkest shows on TV.
Even series creators Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers find themselves reeling when they take a beat to look at where the show started and where it is now, a shift from Point A to Point B that couldn’t be more drastic.
“When we first blocked it out, we realized it wasn’t funny at first,” Bliss laughs, talking about storyboarding the new season. With so many callbacks to previous mysteries, past characters, and unresolved threads, at times the process threatened to transform the writers’ room into Carrie Mathison’s apartment on Homeland.
She marvels at just how grim the new season’s arc appeared at first. “It’s like, this is never going to get funny. But then you go, oh right, now we add the humor.”
“We knew it was going to get so dark, and we wanted the comedy to be as loud as the horror,” Rogers adds. “So we sort of did set out with the ambition to let things go bigger and broader with the comedy.”
Enter The Twink.
It would be nearly impossible to fully catch anyone up on the tangle of plots leading up to Thursday’s Season Four premiere—let alone explain without the history of the previous seasons why shorthanding the season’s Big Bad villain “The Twink” is a stroke of earned comedic genius, and not offensive—but here’s the speediest attempt.
On the hunt for their missing classmate, Dory and Drew accidentally kill someone. It takes a while, but they’re arrested and put on trial, which becomes a tabloid sensation akin to Amanda Knox. They become media stars, attracting fans and stalkers. Chip, played by Cole Escola (who goes by they/them pronouns), becomes obsessed with Dory, fashioning a doll of her and convincing themselves that she’s their best friend.
Chip disguises themselves as a cater waiter for the company Twinkies, which hires attractive and skinny gay men to serve at events, and infiltrates Elliott’s wedding, which Dory attended. After a series of assaults on the group of friends, they’re branded “The Twink.”
When Dory gets off free at the end of her murder trial in the Season Three finale, Chip, “The Twink,” kidnaps her. When we catch up in the Season Four premiere, they’re holding her hostage in an isolation cell, brainwashing her into thinking they’re besties.
Oh, also Chip cross-dresses as a woman named Lila while out in public.
The idea of Escola playing “The Twink” evolved from a chance casting of the actor in season three without a firm plan for the character in season four, other than wanting Escola to be a part of it. Because Chip was introduced to the show through Twinkies catering, the writers room began referring to them as “The Twink” in shorthand, and it stuck.
Each season of Search Party adopts a new tone, transforming the series into something that feels like an entirely different show each season and paying homage to classics of the genre it’s taking on.
Season one parlayed its keen observational comedy about millennials into an action thriller about hipsters harnessing their anxieties into a search for a missing person. Season two became a murder mystery that was equal parts Hitchcockian and Scooby-Doo, while Season Three took the identity of a procedural drama—or dramedy—with My Cousin Vinny, To Die For, and The Bling Ring serving as key inspirations.
For Season Four, “we drew on Misery and Silence of the Lambs,” Bliss says. Adding to the list of reference points you’d never expect in a comedy series: Room, the Oscar-winning, traumatizing film in which Brie Larson plays a mom held captive in a single room with her son. As Dory desperately MacGyvers ways to escape her Twink-held imprisonment, old slasher movies and survivalist thrillers in which the protagonists can’t catch a break come to mind.
In order for any of this to work, let alone be entertaining, it had to be Escola in the role of captor. The comedian and performer’s history of playing with gender and absurdity has just the right demented streak to make the storyline as humorous as it is unsettling. “The Twink is psychotic in a specific creative way that only Cole can pull off,” Bliss says.
Take for example, the song that Chip sings along to as they speed away to their hideaway with Dory tied up in the trunk. (Dark.) They are cheerfully singing along to the buoyant ’90s, get-ya-ass-on-the-dance-floor classic by Deee-Lite, “Groove Is in the Heart.” (Funny!)
It’s their happy song; they sing it when they think Dory is getting along with them. It’s their torture song; they blast it into Dory’s room when she acts out. In every context, the song that reminds most of us of drunken wedding dance floors is perfectly, delightfully absurd.
“When we went out to [Deee-Lite] for that song, we realized that they are very picky about how it’s used,” Bliss says. “When we told them the story, they were down to use it, which is certainly interesting based on the story we were telling.”
Rogers laughs: “We were like, ‘It's gonna be used as torture, but trust us like it’s gonna be funny and great. We promise it’s a compliment.’”
In some respects, it’s as a testament to how irresistible and bouncy the song is, that its best use in a TV series is as juxtaposition to a storyline so sinister. “We also liked the idea that, on some implicit level, Chip fell in love with this song from a place of pain early in life,” Rogers says. “Like it’s Chip’s happy song.”
All of this is to say that Search Party is an unusual show. (Other plot lines this season involve Portia playing Dory in a made-for-TV movie about her murder trial, Elliott pretending to be a radical conservative in order to become a cable news star, and Drew attempting to disguise himself by working in costume at a theme park called Merry Merry Land.) Its path to season four is no less unusual.
The series ran for two seasons on TBS, earning great critical notices and drumming up a cult fanbase. But it was never a ratings juggernaut. When WarnerMedia launched HBO Max, Search Party moved over to the streaming service. Season three of the series had already been shot for TBS when the HBO Max move came with an order for season four. That meant writing the new season before anyone ever saw season three, with no critics’ or fans’ feedback.
“It was like we were rich kids making something,” Rogers says. “Like we got a check from our parents but there was no audience.”
An echo chamber can be a blessing in disguise; it allowed the show’s strangeness to remain intact. A series with this complicated a mythology, this sprawling a web of characters and plot points for viewers to recall, and this level of darkness is typically an antihero cable drama you’d find on HBO or AMC—not a comedy series that premiered on TBS to laugh about the plight of millennials.
“From our perspective,we just keep writing what we like, and then our immediate social circle of friends are the people that give us feedback,” Rogers says. “But then there's this whole other world. Every now and then I'll look at reviews or the Reddit threads or Twitter, and people will still be like, ‘When does the show get funny?’ Like, oh, that's so interesting—I forgot that some people just aren't gonna get it.”
The ones that do are in for a new season that, while certainly charging full-throttle through the looking glass with its meta twists, still feels like the Search Party its cult fans love: At the end of the day, it’s a season about a group of millennials searching for their missing friend. In this case it’s Dory.
And, before you make the joke, yes, Bliss and Rogers know what they should have called the season.
“Finding Dory, yes,” Bliss laughs. Adds Rogers: “We’re actually really upset about the Pixar film for having existed before our season four.”
