According to The Hollywood Reporter, TBS has given a series order to the dark comedy Search Party, starring Alia Shawkat (best known for her role has Maeby Fünke on Arrested Development).The show centers on a four “twenty-somethings” (Shawkat and co-stars John Early, John Reynolds, and Meredith Hagner), who become involved in a search for an old college acquaintance that has mysteriously disappeared. The kicker is that their plight is far-removed from their post-college, laidback Brooklyn lifestyle. Here’s THR‘s description:
Dory (Shawkat) [is] a fragile, frustrated, life-long doormat who is 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.
The show is written and directed by Sarah-Violet Bliss (writer/director of Fort Tilden) and Charles Rogers (of Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, released back in July) and will be supervised by Michael Showalter (of Wet Hot American Summer fame).
The announcement of Search Party comes in the midst of TBS inventing its brand with “edgier”-original programming, an initiative set forth from the network’s new president, Kevin Reilly. Besides American Dad! (which was in itself an import from FOX), the network has abandoned all of its current live-action scripted shows. In addition to Search Party, TBS’ original programming for 2016 includes Angie Tribeca (a cop comedy by Steve and Nancy Carell starring Rashida Jones); Wrecked (a desert island comedy which has been billed as “Lost meets It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”); The Detour (family drama starring Samantha Bee); and The Group (a comedy, executive produced by Conan O’Brien and Greg Daniels, about a journalist investigating a group claiming to have been abuducted by aliens).
Watch the trailer for Search Party below: