Arrest Development‘s Alia Shawkat leads the cast of the mystery/comedy series Search Party from writer/directors Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers. TBS just greenlit the series and will debut the dark comedy in 2016. In addition to Shawkat, the cast includes John Early, John Reynolds, and Meredith Hagner. Bliss, Rogers, Michael Showalter, Tony Hernandez, and Lilly Burns are executive producing.
“Sarah-Violet, Charles, Michael, and this fantastic cast of comedians have truly hit on the glory and utter misery of early adulthood,” stated Brett Weitz, executive vice president of original programming for TBS. “Search Party is a carefully observed, blunt comedy for people who are testing out who they are and who they strive to be.”
The Search Party Plot:
Search Party centers on Dory (Shawkat), a fragile, frustrated, life-long doormat who’s not particularly proud of her impact on the world, especially since her greatest accomplishment to date is organizing clothes to be donated to Goodwill for her wealthy employer. Dory feels stuck in a stale and disconnected relationship with her boyfriend, Drew (Reynolds), a kind of clueless, complacent, spoon-fed doofus who just really loves Christmas.
She also feels removed from her closest friends, Elliott (Early), a self-diagnosed narcissist who loves adding job titles to his designer-stylist-curator multi-hyphenate lifestyle, and Portia (Hagner), an actress always struggling to balance the challenging demands of chronic insecurity and pathological self-absorption.
Search Party opens with Dory learning that Chantal, a girl she barely knew in college, has gone missing. Despite having almost no personal connection to her, Dory becomes fixated on the mystery. Dory, Drew, Elliott, and Portia are not crime solvers. They value brunch, parties, and their own loud opinions. So when Dory drags them into a bumbling, perilous pursuit to find the missing girl, they soon learn the meaning of real danger and become entangled in a sinister plot that is more than their privileged Brooklyn lifestyles ever bargained for.
