Search Party takes delicious pleasure in millennial guilt

What happens when a group of characters whose lifestyle is almost pathologically confessional have to cover something up?

'Search Party' returns.
(Image credit: Jon Pack/TBS)

Search Party — TBS's terrific, odd sendup of millennial foolishness that ripened into a mystery only to shift genres once more in the finale — returned Sunday for a tricky sophomore season that replaces the quarter-life crisis powering the first season with a very 2017 concept of guilt. What happens when a group of characters whose lifestyle is almost pathologically confessional have to cover something up?

The series, which focused on Dory Sief (Alia Shawkat), a dissatisfied seeker who starts filling the holes in her life by searching for a missing girl named Chantal (Claire McNulty), was never easy to define. Half-comedy, half-thriller, Search Party started off by seeming to clumsily bridge the gap. Dory's serious determination to find her "friend" Chantal (they were more like acquaintances) clashed with her actual horrible, myopic, irritating friends: Elliot Goss (John Early), a skilled liar who managed to pivot the revelation that he lied about surviving cancer into a book deal; Portia Davenport (Meredith Hagner), a pretty, flimsy actress who's too needy and self-obsessed to succeed; and rounding out the group is Dory's boyfriend Drew Gardner (John Reynolds), a put-upon killjoy whose brows remind one of nothing so much as a beleaguered muppet.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.