This story about “Party Down” first appeared in the Comedy Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
What makes a good revival series? Ask the cast of “Party Down” and they’ll be the first to admit returning for a third season 13 years after the show went off the air was a risk — both commercially and creatively.
“It’s pretty easy to tarnish the legacy of the show,” star and executive producer Adam Scott
told TheWrap. “No matter how much goodwill you have with an audience, and no matter how great the cast is, if you don’t have a good story and a good reason for those characters to be there, it doesn’t really matter. You can squander that goodwill within the first 10 minutes of the first episode.”
“Party Down” launched in 2009 as a story of Hollywood malaise through the eyes of employees at a catering company, all of whom had bigger dreams and aspirations. Canceled after two seasons on Starz, the comedy series built up a cult following on DVD (Scott said the “cool people” always wanted to ask him about “Party Down”), and cocreator John Enbom started looking at ways to continue the story. One aborted movie and several false starts later, “Party Down” returned on Starz in 2023 with six new episodes, critical acclaim, some new characters and almost the entire original cast intact.
In the third season, the reluctant caterers find themselves back in white shirts and pink bow ties, catering a party for Kyle Bradway (Ryan Hansen), a himbo actor who finally caught a break and landed a superhero movie. Scott’s failed actor Henry Polland is now a high school English teacher in need of extra cash to fund his divorce; Martin Starr’s Roman DeBeers, a screenwriter manqué forever working on his sci-fi opus, is bitter about Kyle’s success; and Ken Marino’s Ron Donald is planning on taking over the catering company but is short on funds.
New characters include Jennifer Garner as a film producer and Tyrel Jackson Williams as an aspiring social media star. “As soon as we got on set and started working, it felt the same, so that was a good
sign for me,” said Starr. “Watching them all come together, I was like, ‘Holy shit. We might have done it. We might have not just not let ourselves down, but also all seven people who watched it the first time who were anticipating this.”
The cast had kept in touch over the years, but standing on set again in character, they felt like no time had passed. “It was as familial and cozy and ridiculous and stupid as it was the first two seasons we did,” said Marino. “It was like summer camp,” Starr added. Scott called the first day of filming
“strange but joyous” and “emotional.”
But revisiting the series didn’t just mean regurgitating the old formula. The show’s writers crafted arcs for the characters that were funny, yes, but also emotionally challenging. Henry, for instance, had some growing up to do. “This person is older and more mature and has let go of a lot of the things that used to be the motor for him, and the things that were the source of angst for him are now gone, he’s moved on,”
Scott said. “Some of it ends up getting reignited and it almost takes over again, and he makes a very mature, healthy decision at the end of the season.”
For Marino, there was a sadness to seeing Ron struggle with some of the same problems that plagued him 13 years ago. “What do you do when you’re at the crossroads of coming to terms with not succeeding?” he said. “It’s just heartbreaking to follow these characters still questioning, figuring out and
trying to come to terms with where they are in life and what that means.”
But if the emotional depth makes “Party Down” that much more resonant, the revival is also true to its beating heart as a laugh-out-loud comedy. One scene in particular that took off on social media finds Ron passing out in a bathroom in the wildest way imaginable. Marino tried to unpack the math behind his approach to physical comedy. “Anytime there’s an action that says he walks into the wall or some physical thing, I do put some thought into what’s the most interesting way to do that as opposed to it just happening in the moment,” he said.
“Sometimes I’ll take swings and I’ll fall on my face, and that happened to be one that came together in a nice way. We did, like, six different versions, and each time I tried something different.”
To a person, every cast member is eager to do more episodes — including Lizzy Caplan who, for scheduling reasons, was only able to do a cameo in Season 3 as Casey Klein, who actually found success as a stand-up comedian. As Caplan said, “I’ll truly only be happy if there is a Party Down Season 4.”
“I think it’s just a matter of the network knowing what they want to do and schedules,” Scott said. “Finding the six weeks for this one was a feat of engineering. I know that it will be challenging, but I know that we’ll figure it out to make it happen.”
Read more from the Comedy Series issue here.
