“Search Party” was an appropriate title for the freshman season of TBS’ hit dark comedy about a young New Yorker who enlists her friends to search for a missing girl. But now that their search is over – and, as it turned out, she wasn’t missing at all – will they have to change the name of the show?
“There’s still a search happening because there’s a dead person, and there is an investigation into who he is and who killed him,” executive producer and co-creator, Michael Showalter, tells TheWrap. “So, in a way, they were doing the searching in the first season, and in the second season, someone else is doing the searching and they’re doing the hiding.”
The Season 1 finale was quite a shocker. What the team of wannabe-gumshoes — Dory, Drew, Elliott and Portia — thought was a mystery (the “disappearance” of Chantal) really was no mystery at all. But because of Dory’s overactive imagination, they’re up to their necks in trouble — starting with that dead body that they’re responsible for.
“One of the big suspenseful questions of this season is, they murdered a man, they’re trying to get away with it, will they get caught?” Showalter says.
If you’re expecting a quickie answer to that question, don’t hold your breath because, Showalter says, “you won’t know until you get to the very end” of the season. And while that’s the show’s long story arc, the smaller arcs throughout the season will also leave you guessing – namely how will the foursome deal (and not deal) with the threat of being found out.
“We explore how this affects each of them as individuals because, in a way, you can never really know how you’d react if something like that had really happened,” Showalter says. “It’s that thing of, you can think you’d know what you’d do but you don’t really know until you’re there. So, how are each of them going to respond to this? And we try to keep the audience [guessing]. It’s not exactly what you’d think they would do. For each one of them, they go in directions you might not see coming.”
There is one twist that will be a tad problemsome while they’re dealing with the fact that they’ve good blood on their hands: “Someone in their world knows their secret,” Showalter says. “There’s someone in their social universe who knows what happened and who knows what they did. We don’t know who it is or what that person is going to do with that information.”
One thing is certain, they’re all at a crossroads, or as Showalter puts it, “Life just changed irrevocably.”
“Search Party” airs Sunday nights on TBS.