Search Party Season 2 premieres November 19th, 10pm on TBS.
*SPOILERS FOLLOW*
After the opening scene of Search Party’s second season, the sky blue title card from last season become soaked in a blood red hue. That scarlet shade remains for the following episodes, symbolizing the darker tone and theme of this season: A murder and its subsequent cover-up. The tiny change in the logo also serves a good metaphor for the show itself; what began as a somber, yet still optimistic mystery-driven story, has since become a bleak tale with little hope.
The premiere picks up where last year’s finale ended. Dory and her crew managed to find Chantal – although she wasn’t actually kidnapped – but killed Keith, an innocent man, in the process. The first two episodes of Season 2 track the friends’ task of disposing of the body and cleaning up the crime scene. The next eight episodes show how the trauma and secrets affect them and the price they pay. My biggest problem with all this was the lack of laughs.
Search Party is a comedy, or at least its supposed to be. That’s why the lack of humor was disturbing. The characters are quirky and intrinsically funny, but this season’s subject matter was so serious that the writers forgot to include jokes. Don’t get me wrong, the story is fantastically gripping and will have at the edge of your seat multiple times, yet you’ll feel a bit cheated. Viewers turn on TBS to laugh, and Search Party has gotten too somber.
I give Search Party Season 2 a B+.
TV and City 