Search Party went from figurative to literal exploration of millennial dystopia

Vulture

The just-concluded HBO Max series' "DNA has contained a certain amount of horror from the beginning of the disappearance-and-death saga, and in its final ten episodes that dropped on HBO Max on January 7, that subtext became the whole damn text," says Roxana Hadadi. "Search Party has always been a figurative exploration of millennial dystopia: unemployment and underemployment, hollow identities and missing selves, aimlessness and emptiness. And its transformation of those existential concerns into the literal end of the world in its concluding season seems as fated as Jeff Goldblum playing an evil tech bro."

ALSO:

• Search Party co-creator Sarah-Violet Bliss on coming up with the final season: "In season 4, when we were thinking about potentially doing a season 5, we had thought about what it would be like for Dory to be on the other end of a near-death experience, and thinking about how then she goes on to more destruction," she says. "It was before COVID was COVID — we originally had an idea that she ended up creating something that becomes a virus. And then COVID happened, and we’re like, 'Well, that’s a little too on the nose.' But we still liked the idea that her trying to do something good becoming something bad."
• Ranking every episode of Search Party based on the outfits worn by John Early's Elliott