The protagonist of Search Party, a ruminative yet rudderless young woman named Dory who jilts her staid hipster existence to try to solve the mystery of an acquaintance’s sudden disappearance, has frequently been referred to by critics as a sort of “millennial Nancy Drew” (which, to some, means she’s an “Anti-Nancy Drew”). This comparison generally stands to establish her as a particular type of protagonist: a young female amateur detective. It also serves to remind audiences of the narrative pitfalls commonly associated with such a character, namely, the cliché of how “seemingly inconsequential objects like a necklace or a torn check all take on greater meaning”— the ability to find direct and obvious clues that act as clear signposts on the way to a solution. But Search Party is not a mystery peppered with the obvious evidential breadcrumb trail of a Nancy Drew story so much as a warning to those (audiences and characters alike) who expect all mysteries to play out this way.
Those who might expect this, the show suggests, are those who have grown up on police procedural dramas, or consumed the mystery stories put out by the Stratemeyer Syndicate (which produced The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, et al.), tales with highly predictable, and even dependable formulas. Indeed, the show is sprinkled with reminders of the expectations of these works: cutting often to the CSI-style TV-show-within-a-TV-show which employs Dory’s blonde, Upper-West-Side-bred best friend Portia, an actress terribly miscast as a young Latina cop. Additionally, the episode titles themselves mimic the cadence of Stratemeyer titles: “The Secret of the Sinister Ceremony,” and “Password to the Shadows.”
This warning, against relying on the events in Season One of Search Party to follow the conventions it flags, is pulled off effectively by swapping in hallmarks from many other groups of detective stories: mostly from film noir and neonoir, but also hardboiled crime, and thriller. But these thematic and aesthetic twists that play out against a backdrop of another entirely different, heretofore unrelated genre: the millennial city comedy. Indeed, the multi-layered Search Party, which aired its first season in pairs of two out of ten half-hour episodes each week (and made all of them simultaneously available online, ready for bingewatching), has been hailed for its particular conformity to the noir genre and its relatives, while retaining the feel and structure of a twenty-two-minute sitcom. It is, many critics have discussed, a comedy about millennials (the white, privileged, Brooklyn-based cut of it), and it retains this sensibility even as its protagonist turns it into a mystery (just not the kind she thinks it is).
Search Party, which initially premiered on TBS and then moved to HBO, becomes an entirely different type of show in each of its five seasons. Genre is a kind of alchemy in Search Party; the different stylistic and thematic associations of each leg of the show seem to activate certain qualities in the characters and then allows those qualities space to grow. This essay is about Season One of Search Party, which is firmly a pastiche that both explores and overthrows the “plucky amateur girl detective” story that has been a sub-genre staple of the detective story for generations.
Dory’s own boring life seems to transform into a nostalgic mystery when Dory believes she sees the missing girl, a former college classmate named Chantal Witherbottom, at night, through the windows of a Chinese restaurant. Dory’s observation is illuminated by glowing red neon signs so commonly associated with neo-noir, a genre which, like its predecessor of film noir, is overwhelmed by antagonistic forces such as conspiracy and corruption, and faces its protagonist with gritty futility. Dory’s first clue – her own view of Chantal—in her Nancy Drew-ish quest, is literally illuminated and colored by a hallmark from another genre. The juxtaposition suggests a darker take on Dory’s discovery than her own excited expectation. Generic trades such as this force a character who has perhaps stylized herself on such an effortless, hyper-successful and ubiquitous archetype, to confront the ambiguity, disillusionment, misapprehension, and failure more familiar to the investigators populating other, less-triumphant detective subgenres.
[Spoilers ahead] Indeed, what makes Search Party truly noir is that it turns out there is no mystery at all, like The Third Man (1974) or Chinatown (1974), the film’s dangling carrot is revealed to be an illusion—more specifically, an exaggeration fabricated by over-reading on the part of the detective, perhaps fostered by the expectation that real-life clue-following is just like the kind that appears in the genre’s more clichéd texts. Dory’s entire journey, starting from this first clue, is based on misunderstanding, miscalculation, and the hope that she can save the day, and will lead to a sensation quite unlike the ending of a Nancy Drew story—the detective’s being entirely wrong. The show builds a perfect conspiracy featuring the missing girl’s secret pregnancy, a simple paper trail leading to a dangerous real estate company making secret deals, a baby-obsessed cult housed inside a pretentious artist collective, and several ambiguous characters, including a gruff, duplicitous private investigator, and a possibly-paranoid woman who insists that there are darker forces at work shortly before she is found dead. Ultimately, though, it turns out that Chantal has chosen to abscond only to take an extreme kind of emotional-health cleanse—leaving her family, friends, responsibilities, and social media profiles to go concentrate on herself for a while and be free from the various pressures in her life.
It’s common, in noir, for the detective to fail in fixing the problem at hand, or to realize that he (in this genre, the detective is rarely not a “he”) has been duped. Often, the mysteries picked up by detectives are dummy-cases generated by enormous and powerful powers, to distract from more substantial, crooked dealings. In such works, the detective must discover that he has been led in the wrong direction, and work to find the truth, even if he is not powerful enough to indict the guilty group. In Search Party, though, the fault lies with the detective. (Well, the show’s missing girl, Chantal, is revealed as being unbearably, cluelessly selfish for disappearing in the first place. But Chantal is a subject for a later episode.)
While such noirish elements pervade the story, the tale also becomes a Hitchcockian thriller for a while (the second episode, after Dory sees Chantal in the restaurant and grasps her first clue, is even called “The Girl Who Knew Too Much” instead of the usual titles). For a while, it hovers in Hitchcockian territory. In Rear Window, an amateur saves the day. In Shadow of a Doubt, the amateur detective on the case is a very young woman who is doubly jeopardized when she figures out that her beloved uncle is a serial killer, while, for example, her even more amateur armchair detective father and his friend sit on the porch solving fake mysteries night after night.
The show even threatens to veer into a tragedy with some playful but very heavy foreshadowing; in an early episode, an older man next to Dory on the subway notices the book Dory is reading—a copy of Anna Karenina that had once belonged to Chantal—and ominously informs her, “I’ll save you the five hundred pages. She dies at the end.”
Search Party does become dangerous, turning the show from a Nancy Drew story, in which an amateur detective learns of and solves a problem perpetrated by someone else after following a string of noticeable clues and putting them all together, into a story that harps on the impossibility of being a Nancy Drew figure in actual life, collecting various genre hallmarks from Hitchcock to noir to tragedy. It even becomes a little Gothic, with Dory’s quest starting to look more and more like Northanger Abbey (which is a novel about a young woman who reads so many Gothic romances that she starts to think she might be in one; she starts applying the ludicrous narrative logic of those books to her own relationships, suddenly suspecting her friend’s father of being a murderer and the like).
As much as the references in Search Party stress that the “mystery” of it all is entirely in Dory’s mind, a product of her imagination, oments like the Anna Karenina comparison punch up the potential for danger in Search Party… not in the sense that “someone will come after” our protagonists, but that there are dark realities of “playing detective” for a real crime or strange event. The problem with Dory’s presentation as, or perhaps even identification with, Nancy Drew is not that such mysteries present a lack of danger—at least once in every book, Nancy gets too close to solving the case, so an attempt is made on her life (she is driven off the road by a suspicious car, she is attacked from behind with chloroform, etc etc). It’s that all of the crimes in the Nancy Drew stories are easily surmountable by Nancy and her friends—while danger is a risk, death is not. Nancy Drew is much too resourceful, clever, and damn lucky for this ever to be her fate. (It is important to note that Nancy Drew is an incredible detective. No human alive could solve every single one one of those things.)
But also Nancy Drew is never wrong! Where she sees a mystery, there is a mystery. There is never a consequence for rampantly speculating about a crime taking place. This is what Search Party tries hard to emphasize: there are consequences, in real life, for playing Nancy Drew. Indeed, the show takes great pains to unearth a kind of cynical realism in light of Dory’s self-fashioning, and reveal that trying to become someone like the fictional Nancy Drew is in fact highly dangerous, because Nancy operates in a world governed by a very different set of rules. Nancy might play with fire in terms of her own personal safety, but she never comes close to ruining someone else’s life. She never lets her own desire to solve a crime become a desire for attention, validation, or the need to feel important. She never gets to “feel” like she’s the protagonist in a mystery because she is in one. On the other hand, Dory’s suspecting that she might be the heroine in a detective story, is revealed as a kind of narcissism, a kind of selfishness, a adrenaline-junkie’s cure for the boredom and malaise of her everyday life.
Search Party isn’t the only show that interrogates the theme of “a normal person wanting to be in a mystery.” That’s a new, reflexive subgenre I have termed “the millennial whodunnit.” In that genre, as I’ve written, “characters lead unfulfilling, unhappy lives, until a murder in close proximity serves to make life interesting again, propelling their daily existence into another genre entirely.”
That our Nancy Drew turns out to be a self-serving, self-absorbed schmo is one of the smart bait-and-switches of the series. Another is that the sexual politics of the Nancy Drew stories are very quickly overthrown in favor of a more disillusioned, realistic take. Ron Livingston plays Keith, the male investigator Dory works with, and it turns out that he does not want to be her professional partner so much as her romantic one. He compliments her beauty while they are sorting through evidence, seduces her at his grimy bachelor flat when they are going over the clues. (This is a show in which older men constantly assail younger women with romantic and sexual overtures.) In the G-rated sexual realm of Nancy Drew, this level of boundary-crossing is never an issue (they’re kids’ books after all); sure, Nancy is belittled by male criminals or underestimated by male clients, but no one does her the indignity of making a pass at her, or trying to turn her from a detective into a sexy sidekick or trophy partner.
Everyone in Search Party is revealed to be less than their crime-story counterparts. We see how they want to be seen, and yet we see theme entirely for who they actually are. That’s the real point of the show. The only mysteries are how low we ourselves are willing to go to prove to ourselves that we are the main character of an exciting story.
