Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Search Party’ Season 3 On HBO Max Picks Up Where The Show Left Off — With Dory And Friends In Big Trouble

When you watch the first episode of Search Party‘s third season, you’ll likely find it hard to believe that it’s been two-and-a-half years since the final episode of season 2 ran on TBS. The look and feel of the show is so consistent with how Season 2 ended that it feels like Season 3 was filmed immediately afterwards. But, unless you just streamed the show in the more recent past — especially at its new HBO Max home — will you even remember what happened to Dory Seif and her self-absorbed friends at the end of Season 2?

SEARCH PARTY SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Dory Seif (Alia Shawkat), her curly mop now in a short crew cut, mason-block wall behind her, slowly raises her head and says coolly, “So you wanna know the truth? Well, this is the truth.”

The Gist: We flash back to where Season 2 of Search Party left off, way back in December of 2017, with Dory in the back of a squad car after pushing April (Phoebe Tyers) off a boat. But she’s not there because of that; she’s there because an anonymous tip connected her to the murder of Keith Powell (Ron Livingston) that happened at the end of Season 1, the same murder that Dory and her ex Drew Gardner (John Reynolds) and their friends Eliott Goss (John Early) and Portia Davenport (Meredith Hagner) spent all of Season 2 trying to cover up.

Dory is being processed and somehow manages a sly smile as she tries to tell the cop taking her mug shot how to use the camera. She doesn’t know any phone numbers except her boss Gail (Christine Taylor), who answers on her Apple Watch in the middle of a movie theater. As Drew, Portia and Elliott wait on a bridge for Dory, who said she paid the debt (in the form of pushing her blackmailer off a boat), Drew gets a call from Gail to say that Dory has been arrested. The three of them decide to reconvene to figure out what to do, and they wonder who tipped off the cops.

Elliott goes home to get solace in the arms of his somewhat dim boyfriend Mark (Jeffrey Self), and Portia goes to a black-box theater where her boyfriend Elijah (Jay Duplass) is doing some sort of acid trip on stage and ensures he wasn’t the one who tipped off the cops. Drew, however, decides to take the first flight to Shanghai, but he’s pulled off the plane by a detective and put under arrest for Keith’s murder, because of — you guessed it — an anonymous tip.

Back at the station, Dory starts hallucinating a waterlogged specter of April while she plots to take the cassette where she admits everything out of a sloppily-attended evidence bag. When she manages to do so — punching herself until her nose bleeds so she can pretend to have a highly-contagious virus and needs her medicine (gulp) — a detective tells her that if she doesn’t talk she’s going to actual jail to await a lawyer, but she refuses to talk anyway. On her way out of the station, she sees Drew walking in handcuffed, about to go into the same interrogation room.

Our Take: That’s a tribute to EPs Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers and Michael Showalter’s dedication to continuing the story instead of skipping forward in time. Though we do get a glimpse of an embittered Dory, who’s been in jail/prison for awhile, so we appreciate that they gave that concession.

We also appreciate Dory’s flashback to all of the events that led up to that moment, another concession to the fact that so much time has passed between seasons. We appreciated it for a different reason than most; even though we were fans of the show’s first season, we didn’t watch season 2. We’re not sure why in retrospect. Maybe because the first season was more of a comedic hipster lark, with these overprivileged characters traipsing around looking for this girl that Dory was barely friends with, and Dory getting obsessed with finding her as a way to cover her empty life and crumbling relationship with Drew.

But when the first season took such a sharp, dark turn at the end, with Keith hitting his head as he falls after Dory tasered him, we weren’t really ready for this fun and hip show to spend a season with the group trying to cover their tracks and having people blackmailing them and police detectives on their trail.

The third season feels like it’s going to continue down that dark path, with half the group in jail and the more narcissistic half — Elliott and Portia — walking free. Of course, funny moments are found in that darkness, like Dory encountering an old high school classmate at the station who was there for some light drug-induced vandalism and the guy who was sitting next to Drew on the plane who “knew” he was trouble — after he was arrested.

But for the most part, it’s going to be about Dory and Drew trying to figure out how to keep themselves from getting life sentences and Portia and Elliott being their usual self-absorbed selves. It’ll be funny and well-written and acted, but we’re not 100% sure we want to see more of this darkness.

Sex and Skin: Nothing, unless you count Elijah and some his stoned friends making like they were on a late-era Laugh-In episode.

Parting Shot: Dory is led out of the station in handcuffs and imagines a throng of reporters asking her very personal questions. “How many people are going to die, Dory?” says April’s wet ghost.

Sleeper Star: We hope to see more of Brandon Micheal Hall as Julian, who was such a big part of the first two seasons, and one of the few voices of reason. Also, since he filmed Season 2 of Search Party, he’s been the star of not one, but broadcast network series (The Mayor, God Friended Me), so he gives the show more star power, we think.

Most Pilot-y Line: The detective interrogating Dory shows her pictures of Keith’s rotted corpse to try to jangle her into admitting that she killed him then covered it up. We know that the show is on HBO Max now instead of TBS, so it can get a little more graphic, but this wasn’t what we had in mind.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you liked Season 2 of Search Party then Season 3 is more of the same. If you were shocked by the show’s dark turn at the end of the first season, though, don’t expect the show to go back to that season’s tone.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Search Party On HBO Max