Why Search Party Ended With Season 5 (Was It Canceled?)

Caution: Spoilers for Search Party ahead.

The fifth season of HBO Max’s Search Party was also its last, but why did the show end with its fifth season? One of Search Party’s hallmarks was its ability to reinvent itself every season. What began as a lighthearted mystery ended as an apocalyptic genre piece, so in theory, the show could’ve kept going after its fifth season. However, there were a variety of reasons that the series’ creators ultimately decided to have the fifth season be the show’s last.

In season 1, Search Party followed directionless millennial Dory Sief as she became obsessed with finding a missing person, Chantal, a former classmate of hers. After a shocking twist revealed that Chantal was not actually missing, but rather hiding from her family as part of a social media detox, Search Party shifted from comedic manhunt to crime cover-up. By season 4, the show was a delightful riff on the movie adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery, and season 3 even borrowed from the world of courtroom drama.

However, the show’s fifth and final season, which incorporated elements borrowed from the zombie apocalypse genre and even the supernatural, was chosen by series creators Charles Rogers and Sarah Violet-Bliss to be its last as they wanted the show to go out with a bang, and with their boldest narrative swing yet. Rogers and Violet-Bliss cited that reinventing the show again after the mind-boggling season 5 would’ve taken the show too far away from its initial premise. Additionally, while at one point season 4 could’ve been Search Party’s last, the creators felt the ending of that season would’ve been too depressing a note to go out on, and therefore began to toss around ideas for a fifth and final season.

When Search Party season 5 was first teased, the season had a lot of expectations weighing on it. The season began with Dory and her friends forming a seemingly messianic cult, and ending with their actions inadvertently causing a Brooklynite apocalypse. This apocalypse was the “bang,” Rogers and Violet-Bliss alluded to in their discussions of the final season. They felt that ending the show with a bang, rather than inventing another season in order to “figure out what happens after the bang,” would ultimately be better for the series as a whole.

Furthermore, when Search Party’s fourth season ended with Dory seemingly dead, Rogers and Violet-Bliss felt that Dory’s demise could serve as a finale for the series. However, they also felt that the enigmatic season 4 ending was ultimately too melancholy of a note to go out on, which led to the development of the off-the-wall fifth and final season. To Rogers and Violet-Bliss, the fifth season felt like a “punctuation mark on the whole series.”

From its cult-following beginnings to its cult-following final season, Search Party was always a show that was continually reinventing itself to secure its longevity. Another hallmark of the series is that many of the main characters don’t change all that drastically over the course of the show. However, with Search Party’s final season, the show (if not the characters) once again changed to meet the current cultural moment, and accomplished its goal of sending itself out with a bang.

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