I first learned of Search Party (2016) at the start of the pandemic. The first two (incredible, original, witty and wonderful) seasons were available to binge on HBO Max, having originally aired on TBS, and the next three seasons were produced and released over the next year and a half. Having just finished the final, underwhelming season, I guess I’m just relieved that it’s over. 

It’s hard to talk about Search Party past season one without delving into spoiler territory, but let’s try. The basic premise of the show is that a group of disillusioned, underemployed millennials get caught up in a murder mystery after their college acquaintance disappears. 

Leading the charge is Dory Sief, a listless Brooklyn hipster with a milquetoast boyfriend and two hilarious, if pathologically narcissistic best friends. Aside from the whole murder plot, this show shares some common DNA with Girls, another HBO series which similarly featured selfish 20-somethings figuring out their place in the world. 

The second season is a psychological thriller that borrows heavily from Hitchcock classics such as Vertigo; the third is a courtroom drama; the fourth an abduction story; and the fifth and final season is, in theory, a suspenseful take on the rise and fall of a doomsday/pseudo-religious/sex cult. 

I say in theory because cult stories, while widely represented in docuseries from Tiger King to the bevy of NXIVM docs, really isn’t all that ripe for parody. Season 5 of Search Party betrays the number one rule of genre parody by forcing its characters into archetypes associated with the genre and thus undermining all of their previous development.

By the final moments of the series finale, Search Party has thrown out everything we love and love to hate about its principal cast and added—and this is a spoiler, but it’s so stupid that I’d be remiss not to mention it—zombies. 

That’s right, the funny murder mystery that once parodied cliches in the then-emerging TV thriller genre devolved into The Walking Dead. You just can’t do zombies in 2022, and you especially can’t put them into your occasionally surrealist but usually grounded half-hour comedy on a whim. So—zombies aside—what went wrong?

Well… yeah, it’s 2022. Zombies are stale, and so are half-assed critiques of millennials. They don’t want to work! They like tattoos and house plants! All these characters are pushing thirty now, and even The Atlantic has come around to apologizing for characterizing a generation living through the fall of Rome as responsible for said fall of the modern American Empire. This time around, Search Party takes one belated stab at poking fun at Gen Z TikTok influencers, and it falls short. Look, if this series had staying power, J. Smith-Cameron wouldn’t have jumped ship over to the far superior Succession.

This is a show that should have ended around its third or fourth season. In season five, it shows that it has nothing more to say, and resorts to unleashing zombies upon unsuspecting, tired viewers, as it finally becomes a zombie of its former self.