(The following contains spoilers for season four of HBO Max’s Search Party.)
As announced today in a press release, HBO Max has ordered a fifth season of Search Party, the true crime-lampooning comedy series that has gradually transformed into a dark parody of the entirety of millennial culture—we are nothing if not self-obsessed murderers (and accessories to murder) looking to boldly embrace our past mistakes like some kind of ill-conceived brand and/or run from them to the wholly artificial joys of childhood, right? In addition to Search Party coming back for another year, showrunners Charles Rogers and Sarah-Violet Bliss have also signed a two-year deal to develop new shows for HBO Max, with the two saying in a statement that “potential titles” for what they could hypothetically come up with include Monkeys Love Manhattan and The Pineapple Predicament. “Those aren’t actual shows we would ever pitch,” they explain, “but it exhibits that we can make up titles if we need to.” That’s pretty funny!
It will be interesting to see where Search Party goes in its fifth season, since every previous year has been a varyingly dramatic departure from the previous ones (like the first season’s mystery storyline eventually turned into season three’s dramatic murder trial). This past season ended with Alia Shawkat’s Dory almost dying in a fire and hallucinating not only her own emotionally cathartic funeral—complete with moving speeches, surprise appearances from old friends, and a terrible ukulele song from John Reynolds’ Drew—but also a subsequent sequence where her friends find a message she left for them before dying. And it was all a dream! It’s a weird show.
Deadline says season five will introduce a newly “enlightened” Dory who is “looking for a redemption” after getting acquitted for murder and surviving all of the terrible shit that happened in season four, though Rogers and Bliss also say it will be “scarier than it’s ever been before.” They say they’re thinking of this as the final season, but they also know to “take the show day by day” so they’re not making any firm plans yet.