What I’m Watching: Search Party

Search Party: Season 2, Episode 3 and 4 “Paralysis” and “Suspicion” (B+)

Now that they’re back home, all four of our protagonists are existing mostly on their own, struggling to acclimate back to reality. I wasn’t expecting Chantal to have such a big part, and her sleeping with Drew was a surprise. He’s becoming a pretty unlikeable character, keeping his distance from her, being excessively rude to Dory, and sabotaging his Chinese-speaking colleague so that he can get the transfer instead. Chantal doesn’t realize just how much Dory invested in trying to find her, but she also doesn’t have a good connection to the real world. She was more than happy to talk to Julien when Dory declined. Dory tried to get her job back with Gail, a woman even less aware of what’s going on around her than Chantal, and she has a decent person to lean on even if she’s not actually listening to anything she’s saying. Getting cornered by two women connected to Keith seemed like it could end badly, but they seemed to believe her lies, and now she’s taking steps to make sure that it looks like Keith went away. Speaking of lies, Elliot is truly outrageous, and his claim that he wrote the entire book but then his laptop got stolen was a real stretch. Portia’s audition was quite unusual, and not only is she being typecast for slasher projects, but she was also forced to make a brutal phone call by Jay Duplass’ director that didn’t showcase her acting so much as her willingness to follow pretty horrific instructions.