Dory Sief: Millennial Void

On Search Party's Season Finale

Hey all! New Year, New…sletter? I’m gonna be playing around with the format and style of Big Little Moments, both in visual style (check out the new lil bars breaking up the sections, I stole that idea from Hunter Harris’ amazing newsletter Hung Up). I’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts or suggestions.

Search Party just had its series finale. Boo! I wanted to write about this genius little show, and its protagonist, Dory Sief. It’s a bit hard to talk about the show without spoilers, but I’ll try and keep vague about the most recent season. If you haven’t seen Search Party, go watch. NOW!

If there’s one thing that defines the Millennial generation, it’s that every other generation is obsessed with us. As the cost of retail skyrocketed and tech giants like Amazon gutted small business competition, millennials were to blame for the “death of retail.” As we entered the workforce, our managers read articles on how to deal with a generation of lazy, entitled narcissists. This projection hasn’t come from the top, either - whole wings of TikTok are dedicated to absolutely brutal “Millennial Slander,” mocking our quippy T-shirts, Buzzfeed slogans, Harry Potter obsessions, and the use of the word “adulting” (my coworkers don’t know “adulting” is bad yet and I don’t have the heart to tell them).

For all of the projection, labeling, and mischaracterization millennials have faced, it’s felt pretty hollow, and often misses the real essence of what it’s like to be one. Yes, we drink coffee and talk about Harry Potter, but what about the mind-numbing, infuriating same-but-a-little-worse-ness of adult millennial life? The boring, pointless bullshit of it all, the headaches that feel like TV static, the hours on YouTube watching people you hate talk about video games you’ve never played? Search Party, maybe better than any other piece of media, captures that funny feeling of being a millennial. And it doesn’t pull punches.

At the center of Search Party is Dory Sief. Bored, uninspired, and lost in life (heard this one before?), Dory happens across a missing poster of a girl she vaguely knew in college. At brunch (there were a lot of brunch jokes in 2016), Dory explains this to her friends, but they’re too self involved to take any interest. It’s none of their business. Dory takes her friends’ indifference as fuel for rightful indignation, and makes her all the more determined to find Chantal. Hence, the search party.  

We learn pretty quickly that Dory isn’t doing this ALL out of the goodness of her heart. Through Chantal, Dory finds attention, admiration, and meaning. She overstates her relationship with Chantal, meets the family, and becomes deeply intertwined in the case. The more she sacrifices herself, the more her peers see her as a caring, selfless, person.

It’s another way the show is pure genius - each season captures the politics of the time it was written, but never in a straightforward fashion. Season 1 skewered the bleeding heart liberals who gave lip service to important causes, but only did so to launder her own guilty conscience (totally unrelated fact, pretty much my whole professional career has been in the nonprofit industry. Interesting!). The joke of Season 1 is that Chantal didn’t need anyone’s help at all - she’d run away from her family after cheating on her boyfriend. A situation eerily similar to Dory’s, but with none of the self-awareness (or murder). 

Seasons 2 and 3, filmed in the height of the Trump presidency, explore the consequence of Dory skirting the law, and fully divorcing herself from the truth. Mirroring our current political situation, we watch Dory skirt consequences despite mountains of evidence to her guilt. She doubles, triples, quadruples down on her lies, and the surrounding chaos allows her walk free.

Season 4 was darkly prophetic, with production wrapping a month before the pandemic swept the country. It featured Dory confined to a single room, cut off from the outside world. She’s the hostage of a crazed fan (played by my name-twin Cole Escola!). Even in her darkest moment, her worst consequence, Dory finds a way to turn her self-flagellation into martyrdom and cause problems for her friends. The final season goes big. After a near-death experience, Dory becomes a cult leader, convinced that her message can save the world. Spoiler - it doesn’t. 

Dory Sief is anything but selfless. Of all the descriptors of millennials, the word “selfish” ranks near the top, and Dory is exactly that. All five seasons of Search Party are like a car crash in slow motion where Dory has the power to stop it at any time, but chooses not to.

If you haven’t seen the show, you might be surprised to hear it’s a comedy. Like any good millennial undertaking, Search Party never quite lands on one thing. It dances between tone and genre, but the one through-line is the humor. The show was basically a TV credit minting operation for every comedian who went to NYU. It’s one of the funniest shows on TV.

It’s interesting, though, that Dory herself is rarely funny. Alia Shawkat had her big break on Arrested Development, one of the most revered sitcoms of the last 20 years, so we know she’s funny. Her acting is excellent - but brooding, serious, and often frightening. She grounds the show and reflects Dory’s transformation from “nice girl” to “bringer of the end times” with an emotional weight that perfectly contradicts the ridiculous circumstances. 

Dory’s journey perfectly captures the emptiness, the constant moral compromise of millennial life. Dory didn’t “mean to” cause pain to anyone, but the consequences of her actions bring pain to everyone in her path. Millennials with privilege try to “do good,” but often feed into racist, extractive systems or malicious operators in the process. We’re told to do the right thing, but see only the worst, most despicable people succeed. We buy expensive educations as a means to escape poverty, but shackle ourselves to a lifetime of debt. Our degrees give us only the tools enough to understand exactly how fucked we all are. So we compromise, prioritize ourselves, and solve nothing.

The final sequence of Search Party is, predictably, perfect. In the wake of the disaster she has created, Dory sees a wall of missing posters, mirroring the one that started it all five seasons ago. Unlike in Chantal’s case, this wall of missing persons have everything to do with Dory - they’re all gone because of her choices. But this time, Dory walks away. She’s learned the ultimate lesson: let it be someone else’s problem. 

What I’m Consuming

I’m finally getting caught up on Succession (midway through season 3 now!) and annoyingly, all of my friends and family were right. It’s so fucking good. I’m weirdly obsessed with the concept of Greg and Tom having a gay romance. We may not get to have healthcare, voting rights legislation, or a working democracy, but the Succession writers can still give us a Tom-Greg kiss.

I’m listening to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell on audiobook, and it’s cute! Very British and wizardy, a light read. The book focuses on British wizards ~bringing magic back to England~ and I’m generally opposed to giving England nice things. But I’ll let this one slide. 

THANK YOU for reading! If you enjoyed, I’d love if you told a friend! I want to expand this newsletter and do more cool things with it! 

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