We’re all drowning in content—so it’s time to highlight the best. In her column, published every Friday, critic Clarisse Loughrey recommends a new show to watch. This week: the revival of cult catering comedy Party Down.
Party Down: Season 3
When you’re stuck in a rut, time starts to lose its meaning. That’s the raw and mildly horrifying truth that drives the revival of Starz’s Party Down, a sitcom about a bunch of LA types stuck in the catering business. It’s also the very thing that prevents this six-episode arc from feeling like yet another one of those exercises in cheap nostalgia. Because how can you mourn a reality that you haven’t exactly been able to escape?
More than a decade has passed since the series was rudely cancelled after two seasons. When we meet the gang again—actors Henry (Adam Scott) and Kyle (Ryan Hansen), writer Roman (Martin Starr), entrepreneur Ron (Ken Marino), wealthy widow Constance (Jane Lynch), and momager Lydia (Megan Mullally)—their circumstances aren’t all that much altered. The Party Down catering company still forces its employees to wear those hideous pink, satin bowties. But here’s the real kicker: Ron, at the end of episode one, cheerily declares: “This year, 2020, is gonna be the best year of my life.” Then the camera drifts casually up to a TV news report. You can guess what happens next.
If anything, the premise of Party Down—the bleak comedy of seeing the world move on without you—feels almost better suited to our times. So much has changed, even in the past couple of years, and yet these characters are still running full-speed into the same barriers like they’re a toddler who’s taken control of the PlayStation. Roman never learned to see women as more than sexual objects. Kyle never matured. Casey (Lizzy Caplan) is out of the picture—supposedly because of Caplan’s other commitments, though the fact critics were only given five of the six episodes makes me wonder whether a final reel cameo might be on the cards. But Henry, her former flame, finds himself drawn into the exact same game of will-they-won’t-they with a film producer (Jennifer Garner)—all desire and yearning, with no real commitment.
These old, stubborn personalities are forced to reroot themselves in a modern world, where the Party Down crew might be called upon to cater for an alt-right group who boast about the “open marketplace of ideas”, which really means inviting a tweed jacket-wearing Nazi (Nick Offerman) to get on stage and insist that Hitler “gets a bad rap”. Kyle, meanwhile, gets involved with a suspiciously Marvel-esque cinematic universe, which he attempts to intellectualise by arguing they’re really just “modern Greek myths”. He probably saw that on Twitter somewhere. There’s a streaming service named Smidgen that condenses all art into manageable chunks you can watch on your phone while sitting on the toilet.
Hollywood is just as callous now as it was ten years ago but, now that social media’s turned every human being into a brand, our characters are forced to contend with a wider set of fame-chasers. Chef Lucy (Zoë Chao) presents a plate of Camembert-filled cake pops as a “rumination on mortality”—then complains that “everyone’s stuck on this idea of food being good” as soon as people start gagging. Saxon (Tyrel Jackson Williams) is a more subtle, and realistic, vision of a TikTok influencer. It’s less about vanity (that’s too easy a target), and more about the sweaty desperation that comes from turning every experience into content.
The show’s tragic, Pagliacci vibe is no better encapsulated than in Marino’s moments of physical comedy. In one scene, he gets caught in a lie, and we get to watch his smile collapse in on itself as he realises, mid-sentence, that no one is buying the nonsense he’s spewing. In another, he’s trapped in deep denial about his own food poisoning. He walks right into a wall and then takes the long way down the floor. It’s so sublimely done that it feels instantly classic, like Buster Keaton for an age where you can show an adult man unleashing a waterfall of diarrhoea into a mop bucket. Party Down—there’s nothing funnier, in a sort of depressing way.
