The sitcom requires failure as a fish requires water. Nobody wants to spend many hours with people who excel at everything, as their perfection is antithetical to both comedy and its antithesis, drama, resulting in the seamless unreality shown on Entourage. The underdog archetype is compatible with the processes of the small-screen half-hour, which rely on the capacity to reset to square one every week for potentially unlimited season-to-season life. Cheers collapses if the gang doesn’t gather at the bar, therefore each character’s Sisyphean desire to escape their own status quo must inevitably lead them back to where they began. (Except Diane, which is a separate entity.) Individuals can adapt and develop, but circumstances cannot; this reassurance lends the sitcom its reassuring constancy, familiarity, and a sense of futility. The show is set in a watering hole where everyone knows your name since these drinkers have nowhere else to go.
Party Down allows failure to sink into its bones, immersing itself in defeated anger until this perspective becomes an all-encompassing lifestyle. By the late 2000s, the workplace-sitcom genre was ripe for subsumption by the gig economy, where dissatisfaction could be built into a premise no one wants to be a part of. For two well-reviewed though little-seen seasons in 2009 and 2010, and now a long-awaited reincarnation on Starz, the irony of having evolved into a comeback-kid cult favorite is not lost on the hapless show that previously garnered a whopping 13,000 viewers for its finale. There is no singular organizing hangout setting; rather, each episode takes place during the course of an event that the team is working, making the unglamorous edge of show business their home base of foiled plans. The struggling Hollywood outsiders consider slinging appetizers to pay the bills as a humiliating pit stop on the road to their elusive big break. As long as they perceive themselves as artists rather than waiters, their drudgery can remain a transitory position and not a profession.
“At a time when kindness and sincerity have taken over the sitcom standard-bearers, the somber pessimism of Party Down returns as a bold tonic”
They are all marking time, and the worrying question is how long a person can do this before giving up on an impossible ideal. Yet as the new episodes reuniting the ensemble more than a decade later reveal, this gnawing inner dilemma is no easier to deal with after the age of forty.
The unimpeachable initial seasons assembled a collection of Z-list scum, each serving as a pawn of the harsh god who decides who succeeds and who fails. Casey (Lizzy Caplan, the only member of the cast not returning for the third season, her absence due to filming Fleishman Is in Trouble being cheekily referenced to in a throwaway joke) squanders her chance in a Comedy Central pilot and is later cut from a Judd Apatow film. Prettyboy Kyle (Ryan Hansen) is cast in the BASE-jumping action film Jumping Boy, which is distributed only on home video in Asian markets. Roman (Martin Starr), a hard sci-fi purist, must watch in horror as his old writing colleague signs a lucrative studio contract. The most pitiful is team captain Ron Donald (Ken Marino), whose ambitions are limited to owning a Soup R’ Crackers franchise. Because their affliction is so often self-inflicted and they are at their greatest when they are at their worst, the basis of melancholy bitterness and well-crafted sitcom farce may coexist happily.
Henry (Adam Scott), a washed-up actor haunted by his beer commercial catchphrase who believes he has conquered the universe by relinquishing ambition, is our protagonist. As he repeatedly flirts with the notion of attempting his profession once more, he comes to exemplify the sensitive sentiment at the core of a very cynical exercise in constant humiliation: as painful as it may be, we have no choice but to make an effort, the alternatives being inacceptable. Whenever he turns, he receives dire predictions of a meaningless future. A neutered suburban dad strips nude at his neighborhood homeowners’ association party to feel anything; a divorcée conducts an orgy that devolves into a self-pitying rage; and a porno awards afterparty devolves into a drug-addled contemplation of the emptiness.
We must all occupy ourselves, if not for reasons of fulfillment, then at least for monetary gain. It’s mostly that first one that brings everyone back together for this unlikely reunion, with alimony-strapped Henry resuming his bartending job as a second job and a post-cancellation Kyle (in his defense, he didn’t realize the song he wrote had such obvious Nazi overtones!) unable to get an audition. Everyone appears well-preserved enough for us to discern that they are better performers than they are pretending to be, but they are not immune to the effects of time. Henry’s generational markers now distinguish him from a subset of his cohort that is younger. The main cast has been augmented with two younger newcomers; Zo Chao, in particular, shines as a chef with grandiose ideas of her own brilliance who is furious that she must waste her talent on shrimp puffs. It’s a unique approach for a show that has studiously eschewed any romantic perspective of fine art, focusing instead on the minimum. Her excitement in her development of “spinahsh,” a non-food item that encapsulates the concept of food, is one of the best running gags in the new episodes.
Tyrel Jackson Williams as resident twentysomething Sackson, a Generation Z influence seeker attempting to dance his way to TikTok virality, is the most significant addition. As a sign of how degraded the entertainment industry has become, the presentation displays beautifully unashamed hatred for the micro-video medium. Sackson engages in a passionate discussion with Constance (Jane Lynch) on the tragedies and successes of show business, until he identifies his muse as “content.” She then encourages him to stop up on “Internet videos with your phone,” stating, “I thought you were referring to a real dream, like being an actor or something.” Yet, the ubiquity of management-mandated social media engagement also adds to the broader institutional degeneration of the acting profession. If you blink, you’ll miss a passing reference to how streaming contracts rob performers of the money they once earned through syndication. It is normally tough to feel sorry for actresses since they are so attractive, but it has become more difficult to do so in recent years.
Starz declined to release the final episode for critics, leaving the penultimate cliffhanger unanswered, with both Henry and Roman on the verge of another shot at stardom. The rules of comic physics push them toward another another embarrassment, leaving them with only one possible destination. The somber pessimism of Party Down — in which job sucks, life sucks, most people suck, but nothing stinks quite as much as the utter, numbing nothingness of apathy — returns as a bold tonic at a time when compassion and sincerity have seized control of the sitcom standard-bearers. These little shards of hope are more meaningful when they are fought for, and the encouragement to fight is believable only when it comes from someone who has experienced existential pain. It is more realistic to state that working for the minimum wage erodes the will to live than that it creates character. Every portobello slider comes with a thorn in the heart and a life-or-death struggle to aim higher.
Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a Brooklyn-based film and television critic. In addition to Decider, his writing has been published in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, and Vox, as well as numerous other semi-respectable journals. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.
»“Party Down” Season 3’s Pessimism Fits “Ted Lasso” Times«
↯↯↯Read More On The Topic On TDPel Media ↯↯↯