After five increasingly absurd and unpredictable seasons, HBO Max’s Search Party has come to an end. The darkly comic series that expertly skewers millennial culture has taken us from Brooklyn brunch to the potential end of humanity as we follow Dory (Alia Shawkat) and friends in her endless pursuit of purpose—to the detriment of everyone around her.

“I think she maybe realized that you’re always searching. That’s what life is. You keep searching until it’s kind of over, right?,” Shawkat says over the phone. “There isn’t some kind of final destination or answer that makes us feel complete. It’s kind of an ongoing wave that we’ve got to just keep riding.”

Below, co-creators and showrunners Charles Rogers and Sarah-Violet Bliss, along with series stars John Early, John Reynolds, Meredith Hagner, and Shawkwat—who conducted her interview separately—take a look back on the final season, their favorite Search Party moments, and braving the elements up until the very last shot.

Vanity Fair: How did it feel to start with a cult hit, and end with a literal cult?

Sarah Violet Bliss: It just always kind of is out of our control [laughs]. We did not think when we wrote the first season of Search Party that it would end where it ends, and become what it becomes. In every new season that we’ve created, we’ve taken bigger and bigger risks. And this was, I think, the biggest one yet. At this point, it felt like we have sort of earned going there—I hope so. I hope that people are along for the ride.

When did you know this was going to be the final season, and when did you come up with the concept?

Charles Rogers: At every step, the show’s sort of presented what it has wanted to do to us. There was a second where we thought season four would be the last season, and we thought perhaps Dory really would die. I’m glad we leaned into that so hard because we ended up treating the idea of that with a lot of weight.

Now that we step back and look at what the show ended up meaning, it’s kind of a journey of self-actualization—for better or worse. Because we were allowed to have so many seasons, it started as a story about somebody who is very much in the dark about who they were to themselves, and ends up being in “the light.” But, you know, is arguably unchanged.

Did anything, or any character, change from the beginning to the end of Search Party?

Meredith Hagner: I always found that there were moments where there were glimmers of Portia’s evolution and growth. And then there would be something that happened that took her immediately back to, like, even a less evolved state. And I thought about that a lot. I was like, Wow, this is a character that life continues to happen to. We all experience that in our own lives. It’s like, you can either have the trauma and learn from it and grow from it, or you just don’t, and you just become a worse version of yourself.

John Reynolds: I don’t know. I think that throughout every season, Drew is just searching for some semblance of normalcy or happiness. When we shot the very end of it, I thought, You know, this is as close as he’s going to get. He found some happiness in a way. He got to marry Dory.

John Early: Yeah, I think that there’s just something really refreshing about Search Party. Despite its scope, it still lets you enjoy the fact that the characters don’t change, which is what I think is satisfying about great TV comedies—you come back for the same flaw. So even though it has this very ambitious reach, especially by the end of the fifth season, they’re still the gang that you know and love from season one. And I think that’s psychologically maybe more honest than TV shows that are obsessed with making their characters grow.

Rogers: The essence of the show is about the soup of life, and about the fact that everything is actually gray. Life isn’t about pointed questions like that; it’s actually just about the really confusing nature of people. The show has always tried to unpack something new about them, but at the same time, it’s not suggesting that they’re good or bad.

Alia Shawkat: In some ways they never change. I think there’s some acceptance by the end of the last season that they’ve come to, almost like accepting that you can’t really change every part about you. I mean, the characters have gone through so many crazy things, and hopefully you don’t have to kill a couple of people to realize that [laughs]. But, yeah, I think by the end, they have in some way come to some kind of peace. And I think she maybe gets a glimmer of that in that very last moment, where she’s like, ‘Wow. I guess this is it. I guess I’ll just keep going.’

What was it like shooting the final season?

Hagner: It was fun, but it was an intense shoot. There were really hard days and the days are long. I just had a baby. But it was amazing as always.

Reynolds: It felt sort of business as usual. It didn’t feel sad or sentimental, until the last day. The last day coincided with the last scene, and that was intensely emotional. There was a warm glow in the morning, and everyone was half asleep and then showed up to set. And it was like, ‘Ah okay, well, one person’s crying.’ And then it just started from there.

Shawkat: All the photos of the missing people are crew members. So there is this real moment where we’re looking at everyone who was involved in making the show over the last five years. And it just really hit us. Everything slowed down. We all held each other and cried and laughed.

Early: Besides the fact that the show is very beautifully unsentimental in a very principled way, the experience of it has been very unsentimental for us because now three seasons have been released in a pandemic. We’ve been robbed of a lot of ceremony. That would have helped us, I think, feel the kind of catharsis of sharing something you’ve worked on with the world. I think we didn’t expect much at all. But, yeah, the last day we all were very unexpectedly emotional.

We were shooting on the day of the flash floods last summer in New York. We were shooting in Red Hook, which is essentially, like, underwater already.

Reynolds: It was [Hurricane] Ida, right?

Early: We literally didn’t shoot a whole scene. At the very end, Charles and SV ran in with flowers in the middle of us shooting a scene and were like, That's a wrap on the series. We have to go. Literally. John [Reynold]’s trailer was underwater. I mean, you had to wear boots to get into your trailer.

Reynolds: The last shot was an insert on a computer. We were all getting these flash flood warnings. We were all standing around the computer being like “Is this really going to be the last shot? I guess this is fitting.” And then, yeah, then I had to put on wellies and wade through water and go pick up all my shit.

Search Party changed so much every season. Do you have a particular favorite season? Favorite moments?

Hagner: John does nothing half assed. We were background for a couple days, and we took it so deadly seriously. We even got applauded by a guest director who was like ‘Hey, thank you guys for taking it seriously.’ Remember that?

Early: In a lot of the ensemble scenes with the disciples, those were, like, brutal shooting days. There’s so many people, there’s so much coverage. There are a lot of big, long, single takes. So there’s lots of stuff of Portia and Elliot being good little helpers to Dory, and Meredith and I had a good time with that.

Hagner: I think as someone who started in background, it really felt like home for me, in a sense [laughs].

Early: [shouting] And as someone who started in theater, it really put me back in touch with the ensemble spirit [laughs]. I’ll say that I love season two, to answer your question. I am partial to season two just because I got to do a lot of physical stuff, like my hair falling out and shitting in my pants and the rash. It was full Island of Dr. Moreau—it was so fun.

Reynolds: I would say overall maybe season one, just because it was all so new. We were all babies and just sort of figuring it out.

Hagner: Season one we would look at each other and be like “what is this? What are we even doing?” That was magic in itself because you don’t have any concept of what you’re making. You’re just kind of trusting these people that you think are really talented and brilliant, SV and Charles. And then you watch, and you’re like, holy shit.

Shawkat: I would definitely say the first season, because it kind of stands alone in a weird way. I love all the other seasons but it could have just been that one season—it was the thesis, you know? I really liked making it. We didn’t know what we were making—we didn’t know the tone—so it felt really like we were all building something with our eyes closed. I’m so proud of how it turned out because we were all kind of surprised. We were like, What show is this? And then it really came together.

What are you going to miss now that it’s over?

Hagner: The thing that I’ll miss the most is the unspoken, comfortable, symbiotic creative relationship that I feel like all four of us plus SV and Charles have. It’s this comfortable creative ease. There are projects you feel that on, and then the thing ends up being bad. But I felt that for this, and it’s really fucking good.

Bliss: All of us were kind of “emerging talent”—we all became kind of professionals on this show, and that really is kind of sweet.

Reynolds: There’s a specific dynamic that we all have with the crew that has been pretty constant over the five years. I think maybe the next time I’m on a really shitty job, it will hit me really hard that I miss Search Party.

Shawkat: It’s truly the best cast I’ve worked with in the sense that everyone’s kind and giving and everyone loves the project so much. Everyone’s all in.

Early: I’m just so pissed it's over. It’s so rare that you’re not just like, bored and muted and held back. I feel like everything is so mediocre and safe. My experience of acting is usually about feeling, I don’t know, uncomfortable, and like I’m not doing it right. Search Party just fit like a glove for all of us—it’s comedy with a capital C. I feel very grateful to be a part of something that’s made in today’s television climate that is saying a lot without saying a lot. There’s just so much pressure on things today to, like, make a statement or to like “teach people.” I feel like Search Party was always kind of made in a cave away from that, from the discourse.

Okay, I just want to quickly say, we should probably get out in front of it—Charles’s parents paid for the show [laughs].

Rogers: Yeah, my parents really wanted… Hailee Steinfeld to be Dory. And Tavi Gevinson to be Elliot [laughs].

Hagner: Who did they want to play Portia?

Rogers: Kaley Cuoco.

Reynolds: What about Drew? Round it out…

Rogers: Gary Sinise.

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