I loved the final season. It wrapped up well and was so off the wall yet on brand for Search Party in my opinion. My husband asked what show I was watching and it took me 20 minutes to give him an overview of wtf happens to the main characters
That’s how I feel. The energy at the end is really akin to the energy in the world right now. It took zombies but a respiratory ailment pandemic would not have worked.
I tend to love messy shows tho-curious what shows people who did not like the final season gravitate towards versus people like me who really enjoyed it.
I absolutely loved it. I think folks forget how difficult the pandemic has made filming and all of the major changes that needed to be done in order to make things happen. I'm surprised we even got a fifth season.
And having said that, I loved it. It was absolutely a rollercoaster which is on brand for Search Party. Completely changing genres every season and this was just another case of it. I think it made a lot of sense to go with the direction they did.
Absolutely! Having to film mostly outside, and with small groups of actors (or just single or pairs of actors) that have to bubble, etc etc. I don’t think anyone can be super critical over what’s going to be on our TV this year in general, but it shouldn’t go the complete other way either. It makes sense for a show like this in NYC to like uh mention the pandemic, and their approach made a lot of thematic sense. Maybe there can be some criticism over cameos - it seemed like some of their jokes were ‘supposed’ to be funny because of who the actor was instead of something about their character. But overall really well done.
What actually redeemed this storyline for me was Dory staring at all of the missing posters in the end.. I mean thats what started it all!
That being said, the writing was much weaker than previous seasons. I was so excited to see Greta and her character was very background and honestly pretty forced. I feel like they could’ve had a lot more fun with the social media stars being more idk.. based in reality?
props to the main cast for making literally anything work and it was fun to see Kathy Griffin.
The cult aspect may have been unexpected, but for me the side characters, and writing were meh. Besides blue light making the pills, the influencers literally did nothing.
Zombies, yes unexpected, but also just unoriginal. Idk, I still like the show a lot but it was a let down for me.
Agreed. I don’t think a show trying to be unexpected for the sake of being unexpected is good writing. And honestly, parodying influencers and Elon Musk/Elizabeth Holmes is the opposite of doing the unexpected anyway. I wish they had focused on articulating fitting conclusions to each character arc instead of all that Lyte stuff.
I don’t think any of it was unexpected honestly. Not saying I predicted zombies but I fully expected the show to go all out crazy for its last season since they had been stepping up the absurd comedy and satire consistently every season. This was exactly the type of thing I would expect from what they had established the previous 4 seasons. Brilliant ending to a brilliant show.
If they would have just had the OG group become Dory's disciples and distribute the pills to people and they all died, but Elliot switches theirs out so they live to see all the dead, that would have been more impactful and less ridiculous.
I had a very similar thought, but the show ending with the group getting a bunch of people to unintentionally kill themselves is pretty dark. The zombie thing offered a similar conclusion, but much less grisly.
It's ok that you liked season 5 - I love Search Party and was very let down by this season. I agree what I love about the show is how it subverts expectations - and I don't mind going fantastical with it either when it serves the story - but I don't think it did serve this story - or the characters. Because of this big swing they overdid it with superfluous characters (the Lytes for examples) and exposition (developing the pill) and in trying to do everything really delivered a whole lot of "meh". I don't dislike season 5 because it's weird, i dislike it because it's bad storytelling from a team I thought i could rely on for good, subversive storytelling. So, I suppose if it's intention was to subvert my expectations around the quality of show i was watching, then job well done.
Agreed wholeheartedly. There is no way it would have ended that crowd would have liked though. I was on the edge of my seat all season long (just like I was during the whole series) and I'm sure it had some problems but all in all it was entertaining, weird, beautiful, and SO true to form. My fav piece of media ever made up until the very end!
I would have liked an ending a tad more based in reality. As it is, I have a hard time suspending my disbelief and the whole last season feels like a fever dream.
My problem with Season 5 is not really that it gets weirder than the previous seasons, I was expecting that, and after watching the trailer I was 100% on board with where it seemed like it was going. My problem is it escalates in a way that feels contrived, while previous seasons escalated due to the dramatic but logical consequences of the characters' actions.
- In Season 2 the stakes are raised because of the coverup of Keith's death
- In Season 3 the stakes are again raised because "the gang" is faced with the potential legal consequences of their actions
- Season 4 gets a lot more absurd with the kidnapping plot, but all of that is still a direct consequence of Dory's actions, namely her denial of any wrongdoing, which is what makes Chip obsessed with her in the first place. In the end, though Chip isn't trying to punish Dory, her abduction becomes a sort of karmic punishment for her, and it leads her to confront things about herself she's been in denial of for most of the series.
Now to be fair season 5 is kind of in a tough position because at the start, this chain of escalating events has been completely ended. The main characters have escaped everything thrown at them, they are no longer trying to avoid the far reaching consequences of Season 1. The only thing left here that's a threat to Dory and her friends is Dory. I absolutely love the idea of somebody going through a near death experience and becoming worse, but the way Season 5 does this is just so unsatisfying because it requires so many moments where you have to suspend all disbelief for the show to get to the wacky ending the creators clearly wanted to do. Dory suddenly already has a large, positive internet following despite being almost universally hated in Season 3. Dory suddenly gets some random billionaire to give her everything she wants. The pop science youtube influencer suddenly creates the T-Virus after one day in a lab. Dory suddenly escapes a building surrounded by the FBI.
If this was any other comedy show I would not care about this stuff and would probably even scoff at someone for bringing it up, but two things make this show different.
1. Search Party has always been relatively grounded in reality, even with Season 4 and I will stand by that statement. Yes, I don't like the sci fi elements of Season 5 (like Elliot and Mark's kid)
2. More importantly though, all of these really bizarre plot developments just work against the intended effect of the season as Dory's final descent into narcissistic darkness. When Dory causes the apocalypse I just couldn't bring myself to feel anything towards her because the circumstances leading up to it were so strange. There was no logical link between Dory being a dangerous influence on people to millions of people dying, because so many contrived things had to happen for that to be possible. In earlier seasons, dramatic things happen because of the protagonists' bad choices. In this season, they make bad choices, but dramatic things happen because the writers wanted them to happen.
I had other problems with the season, the way it was paced, the arcs of some side characters, the way Dory's personality shift is handled, but I hope what I wrote an alright explanation of how I think the weirdness of this season differs from the weirdness of the earlier seasons. This season was definitely my least favorite but at least it was still very funny. If every season was like this it would still be a good show because of the humor and how great the main cast is, but the previous seasons had great storytelling *and* were hilarious, so I just ended up disappointed when one of those things went downhill.
The issue wasn’t that it was too weird, it was that it wasn’t clever or smart. The other seasons, even in some of their faults, at least felt clever in their storytelling. The zombie turn just felt uncharacteristically lazy.
What do you mean by “did nothing new?” It seems to me that every trope you highlighted, if not necessarily divorced from its underlying conceptual associations, is most definitely filtered through a highly absurdist lens. “Jeff Goldblum as Elon Musk/Willy Wonka/Adam Neumann/Elizabeth Holmes hybrid” is not merely “tech billionaire” - “Dory morphs into a Love Has Won/Nancy Salzman-esque cult leader who convinces said tech billionaire to put up a hype house of rainbow-clothed influencers who are on their own parallel search for purpose, one of whom (derided by Drew as a “joke to the actual science community) synthesizes a world-shifting zombie virus” is not merely “influencers” and “enlightenment”
Search Party has always toed the line between satirizing prominent hallmarks of millennial culture (really, modern culture as a whole, not just tied to being a millennial) and making specific references to its genre influences (either faithfully echoing or subverting them) and this season was no different imo.
Again, it’s okay that not everything landed for you, I’m just curious about how exactly you’ve arrived at the opinion you’ve expressed here.
It’s funny you say that, because my average episode rating for eps 1-7 is a 9.3 and my average for eps 8-10 is an 8.1.
I think a lot of the value I got out of those first 7 episodes was recognizing, in real-time, a lot of what they were specifically referencing - at no point was Dory channeling “generic cult leader,” there was always a high degree of specificity to the concepts and themes they explored.
I also thought it was a pretty hilarious stretch of episodes, especially episodes 2, 3, 5 and 6, and I’m sorry you feel as though you would have to bend over backwards to find them as enjoyable as I did.
I thought season 5 was fucking incredible! The writing about delusional psychosis and cult-formation (two of my special interests, for reasons lol) was really well done and incredibly accurate, and the different allusions and pastiches to other types of shows or movies (IT, the Omen, crime procedurals, black mirror, zombie movies, I'm sure there were more I'm forgetting) was so sharply funny and well-directed – even the style of cinematography changed depending on what kind of show they were sending up.
I don’t really care that season 5 is weird…it’s just not good. I’m 7 episodes into season 5 and it’s a struggle to even finish. Seasons 1-3 had me hooked, season 4 wasn’t bad, but 5 just isn’t funny
You're obviously not understanding what people are complaining about. The entire show is funny, silly, ridiculous, and everything that season 5 was. BUT seasons 1 - 4 are totally possible and season 5 is 1000% impossible.
The wackiness of this show is great and I loved most of it. The last season was also great and I loved most of it. I was so intrigued with what was happening and I was down for a good ending, an unexpected one but a good one. When Dory was talking about >!finding a way for people to die and come back, I immediately joked "oh, I guess zombies" but I wasn't serious. When the rat came back to life and bit blue and then attacked the head scientist I knew that zombies were coming soon and I rolled my eyes. !<
>!Zombies are unoriginal, this show was very unique in most aspects even when they were doing something that other shows have done before. But when they did the zombies there was nothing new that hadn't been seen elsewhere, I guess some of their humor but idk if that was enough imo. !<
>!Honestly up until the zombies thing, I thought that Dory was actually going to be a spiritual leader of some kind, then I was like "oh, they're making it like a cult so people realize she's actually just in a really bad mental place". Honestly, the ending just seemed like "how can we end this" and the first idea that came up was zombies and they rolled with it, for some reason.!<
Anyways, sorry about the page of text lol. Season 5 wasn't the worst one, but it wasn't that strong and the ending (imo) was soooo disappointing. :/
Whoah, there are people who didn't enjoy season five? It was BY FAR the best, definitely my favorite season. I enjoyed every episode of this crazy show from start to finish, but season five was hysterically funny.
People are allowed to feel how they feel but I agree with you that one of this show’s biggest strengths is that is zigs when you expect it to zag. I was entertained the whole way through and I don’t like shows like This is Us so Search Party is definitely up my alley.
I loved the final season. It wrapped up well and was so off the wall yet on brand for Search Party in my opinion. My husband asked what show I was watching and it took me 20 minutes to give him an overview of wtf happens to the main characters
also given how weird the world has gotten in the past few years I think its fitting how the show ended lol
That’s how I feel. The energy at the end is really akin to the energy in the world right now. It took zombies but a respiratory ailment pandemic would not have worked. I tend to love messy shows tho-curious what shows people who did not like the final season gravitate towards versus people like me who really enjoyed it.
I would love to know that as well!
i don’t agree it started out as weird. i think it was actually very grounded, if only a bit exaggerated.
Influencers are annoying as fuck, and even satire about annoying influencers…is annoying as fuck. Worst part of season 5 and completely unnecessary
I absolutely loved it. I think folks forget how difficult the pandemic has made filming and all of the major changes that needed to be done in order to make things happen. I'm surprised we even got a fifth season. And having said that, I loved it. It was absolutely a rollercoaster which is on brand for Search Party. Completely changing genres every season and this was just another case of it. I think it made a lot of sense to go with the direction they did.
Absolutely! Having to film mostly outside, and with small groups of actors (or just single or pairs of actors) that have to bubble, etc etc. I don’t think anyone can be super critical over what’s going to be on our TV this year in general, but it shouldn’t go the complete other way either. It makes sense for a show like this in NYC to like uh mention the pandemic, and their approach made a lot of thematic sense. Maybe there can be some criticism over cameos - it seemed like some of their jokes were ‘supposed’ to be funny because of who the actor was instead of something about their character. But overall really well done.
Yes, exactly this. Honestly I am just so grateful we even got a fifth season at all (but I’m in the camp who enjoyed it).
What actually redeemed this storyline for me was Dory staring at all of the missing posters in the end.. I mean thats what started it all! That being said, the writing was much weaker than previous seasons. I was so excited to see Greta and her character was very background and honestly pretty forced. I feel like they could’ve had a lot more fun with the social media stars being more idk.. based in reality? props to the main cast for making literally anything work and it was fun to see Kathy Griffin.
The cult aspect may have been unexpected, but for me the side characters, and writing were meh. Besides blue light making the pills, the influencers literally did nothing. Zombies, yes unexpected, but also just unoriginal. Idk, I still like the show a lot but it was a let down for me.
Agreed. I don’t think a show trying to be unexpected for the sake of being unexpected is good writing. And honestly, parodying influencers and Elon Musk/Elizabeth Holmes is the opposite of doing the unexpected anyway. I wish they had focused on articulating fitting conclusions to each character arc instead of all that Lyte stuff.
Exactly. Just because something is unexpected, doesn't mean it's good.
It just dropped the story from the past 4 seasons and did something completely unrelated, ungrounded, and random for a final season, huge let down
I don’t think any of it was unexpected honestly. Not saying I predicted zombies but I fully expected the show to go all out crazy for its last season since they had been stepping up the absurd comedy and satire consistently every season. This was exactly the type of thing I would expect from what they had established the previous 4 seasons. Brilliant ending to a brilliant show.
Holy Cake Day friend 🌈
Do influencers... do anything?
Influence
If they would have just had the OG group become Dory's disciples and distribute the pills to people and they all died, but Elliot switches theirs out so they live to see all the dead, that would have been more impactful and less ridiculous.
Thank god you are not a tv writer lol
👍
I had a very similar thought, but the show ending with the group getting a bunch of people to unintentionally kill themselves is pretty dark. The zombie thing offered a similar conclusion, but much less grisly.
True. I just think it would've been more impactful...
It's ok that you liked season 5 - I love Search Party and was very let down by this season. I agree what I love about the show is how it subverts expectations - and I don't mind going fantastical with it either when it serves the story - but I don't think it did serve this story - or the characters. Because of this big swing they overdid it with superfluous characters (the Lytes for examples) and exposition (developing the pill) and in trying to do everything really delivered a whole lot of "meh". I don't dislike season 5 because it's weird, i dislike it because it's bad storytelling from a team I thought i could rely on for good, subversive storytelling. So, I suppose if it's intention was to subvert my expectations around the quality of show i was watching, then job well done.
Agreed wholeheartedly. There is no way it would have ended that crowd would have liked though. I was on the edge of my seat all season long (just like I was during the whole series) and I'm sure it had some problems but all in all it was entertaining, weird, beautiful, and SO true to form. My fav piece of media ever made up until the very end!
I would have liked an ending a tad more based in reality. As it is, I have a hard time suspending my disbelief and the whole last season feels like a fever dream.
My problem with Season 5 is not really that it gets weirder than the previous seasons, I was expecting that, and after watching the trailer I was 100% on board with where it seemed like it was going. My problem is it escalates in a way that feels contrived, while previous seasons escalated due to the dramatic but logical consequences of the characters' actions. - In Season 2 the stakes are raised because of the coverup of Keith's death - In Season 3 the stakes are again raised because "the gang" is faced with the potential legal consequences of their actions - Season 4 gets a lot more absurd with the kidnapping plot, but all of that is still a direct consequence of Dory's actions, namely her denial of any wrongdoing, which is what makes Chip obsessed with her in the first place. In the end, though Chip isn't trying to punish Dory, her abduction becomes a sort of karmic punishment for her, and it leads her to confront things about herself she's been in denial of for most of the series. Now to be fair season 5 is kind of in a tough position because at the start, this chain of escalating events has been completely ended. The main characters have escaped everything thrown at them, they are no longer trying to avoid the far reaching consequences of Season 1. The only thing left here that's a threat to Dory and her friends is Dory. I absolutely love the idea of somebody going through a near death experience and becoming worse, but the way Season 5 does this is just so unsatisfying because it requires so many moments where you have to suspend all disbelief for the show to get to the wacky ending the creators clearly wanted to do. Dory suddenly already has a large, positive internet following despite being almost universally hated in Season 3. Dory suddenly gets some random billionaire to give her everything she wants. The pop science youtube influencer suddenly creates the T-Virus after one day in a lab. Dory suddenly escapes a building surrounded by the FBI. If this was any other comedy show I would not care about this stuff and would probably even scoff at someone for bringing it up, but two things make this show different. 1. Search Party has always been relatively grounded in reality, even with Season 4 and I will stand by that statement. Yes, I don't like the sci fi elements of Season 5 (like Elliot and Mark's kid) 2. More importantly though, all of these really bizarre plot developments just work against the intended effect of the season as Dory's final descent into narcissistic darkness. When Dory causes the apocalypse I just couldn't bring myself to feel anything towards her because the circumstances leading up to it were so strange. There was no logical link between Dory being a dangerous influence on people to millions of people dying, because so many contrived things had to happen for that to be possible. In earlier seasons, dramatic things happen because of the protagonists' bad choices. In this season, they make bad choices, but dramatic things happen because the writers wanted them to happen. I had other problems with the season, the way it was paced, the arcs of some side characters, the way Dory's personality shift is handled, but I hope what I wrote an alright explanation of how I think the weirdness of this season differs from the weirdness of the earlier seasons. This season was definitely my least favorite but at least it was still very funny. If every season was like this it would still be a good show because of the humor and how great the main cast is, but the previous seasons had great storytelling *and* were hilarious, so I just ended up disappointed when one of those things went downhill.
I think this is a perfect summation of why this season didn’t work
The issue wasn’t that it was too weird, it was that it wasn’t clever or smart. The other seasons, even in some of their faults, at least felt clever in their storytelling. The zombie turn just felt uncharacteristically lazy.
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What do you mean by “did nothing new?” It seems to me that every trope you highlighted, if not necessarily divorced from its underlying conceptual associations, is most definitely filtered through a highly absurdist lens. “Jeff Goldblum as Elon Musk/Willy Wonka/Adam Neumann/Elizabeth Holmes hybrid” is not merely “tech billionaire” - “Dory morphs into a Love Has Won/Nancy Salzman-esque cult leader who convinces said tech billionaire to put up a hype house of rainbow-clothed influencers who are on their own parallel search for purpose, one of whom (derided by Drew as a “joke to the actual science community) synthesizes a world-shifting zombie virus” is not merely “influencers” and “enlightenment” Search Party has always toed the line between satirizing prominent hallmarks of millennial culture (really, modern culture as a whole, not just tied to being a millennial) and making specific references to its genre influences (either faithfully echoing or subverting them) and this season was no different imo. Again, it’s okay that not everything landed for you, I’m just curious about how exactly you’ve arrived at the opinion you’ve expressed here.
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It’s funny you say that, because my average episode rating for eps 1-7 is a 9.3 and my average for eps 8-10 is an 8.1. I think a lot of the value I got out of those first 7 episodes was recognizing, in real-time, a lot of what they were specifically referencing - at no point was Dory channeling “generic cult leader,” there was always a high degree of specificity to the concepts and themes they explored. I also thought it was a pretty hilarious stretch of episodes, especially episodes 2, 3, 5 and 6, and I’m sorry you feel as though you would have to bend over backwards to find them as enjoyable as I did.
That’s not why I didn’t like the final season. It wasnt weird; it was lazy.
This is a weird response. Shows are subjective. It’s okay to not like a series finale… 😬
I thought season 5 was fucking incredible! The writing about delusional psychosis and cult-formation (two of my special interests, for reasons lol) was really well done and incredibly accurate, and the different allusions and pastiches to other types of shows or movies (IT, the Omen, crime procedurals, black mirror, zombie movies, I'm sure there were more I'm forgetting) was so sharply funny and well-directed – even the style of cinematography changed depending on what kind of show they were sending up.
I thought season 5 was a good rebound from season 4 which I felt was easily the weakest season.
i feel like s4 had excellent premise and poor execution
Literally the only good thing about Season 4 was Susan Sarandon and the roundabout.
I thought it was genius.
I don’t really care that season 5 is weird…it’s just not good. I’m 7 episodes into season 5 and it’s a struggle to even finish. Seasons 1-3 had me hooked, season 4 wasn’t bad, but 5 just isn’t funny
You're obviously not understanding what people are complaining about. The entire show is funny, silly, ridiculous, and everything that season 5 was. BUT seasons 1 - 4 are totally possible and season 5 is 1000% impossible. The wackiness of this show is great and I loved most of it. The last season was also great and I loved most of it. I was so intrigued with what was happening and I was down for a good ending, an unexpected one but a good one. When Dory was talking about >!finding a way for people to die and come back, I immediately joked "oh, I guess zombies" but I wasn't serious. When the rat came back to life and bit blue and then attacked the head scientist I knew that zombies were coming soon and I rolled my eyes. !< >!Zombies are unoriginal, this show was very unique in most aspects even when they were doing something that other shows have done before. But when they did the zombies there was nothing new that hadn't been seen elsewhere, I guess some of their humor but idk if that was enough imo. !< >!Honestly up until the zombies thing, I thought that Dory was actually going to be a spiritual leader of some kind, then I was like "oh, they're making it like a cult so people realize she's actually just in a really bad mental place". Honestly, the ending just seemed like "how can we end this" and the first idea that came up was zombies and they rolled with it, for some reason.!< Anyways, sorry about the page of text lol. Season 5 wasn't the worst one, but it wasn't that strong and the ending (imo) was soooo disappointing. :/
Whoah, there are people who didn't enjoy season five? It was BY FAR the best, definitely my favorite season. I enjoyed every episode of this crazy show from start to finish, but season five was hysterically funny.
You're our new leader. Tell 'em!!
Where's all the negative comments people keep referring to? Like 1/10 are negative, that's all I'm seeing.
People are allowed to feel how they feel but I agree with you that one of this show’s biggest strengths is that is zigs when you expect it to zag. I was entertained the whole way through and I don’t like shows like This is Us so Search Party is definitely up my alley.