Search Party's anxious identity crisis is one of its biggest strengths

Defector

"One of the side effects of watching four seasons of a TV show in the span of a week is that you don’t get to feel lengthy periods of confusion," says Luis Paez-Pumar. "If something happens on a show that changes up the status quo, you can always just hit play on the next episode, or the next season, and adapt. To be binge-proof—and by that I mean that the experience of watching a show should not necessarily be enhanced by a week’s worth of anticipation in between episodes—a show either has to rely on the strength of its own narrative (instead of twists and turns and mysteries), or it has to make the plot shifts so dramatic that they stick in the viewer’s mind even as they blaze through to the next portion of the story. Search Party is not the first show to follow the latter roadmap, and it won’t be the last, but it is—by some happy combination of its subject matter, the strength of its cast, and its willingness to be as batshit crazy as possible—one of the best suited for tidal waving away its own premise. Over the course of its run—with season four recently concluding on HBO Max— the show has been a mystery drama, a psychological thriller and murder cover-up, a legal procedural, and then an exploration of trauma and loss of identity. If there is one consistent gimmick to the show, it’s that the gimmick is always changing. Perhaps it’s not a gimmick, then, but a feature."