Search Party Confirmed to End With Season 5

The upcoming season of Search Party will unfortunately be its last. The acclaimed comedy thriller has enjoyed a great run over the last few years, beginning as a word-of-mouth hit on TBS before moving to HBO Max ahead of its third season, but all great things come to an end. HBO Max announced on Tuesday that Search Party will officially be ending with Season 5 early next year. The fifth and final season will consist of 10 episodes, all of which are being released on the streaming service on January 7, 2022.

Search Party is one of quite a few TV shows to find a bigger audience on HBO Max after debuting on another network or platform. HBO Max has taken on other shows like Doom Patrol, Titans, and Warrior, making them originals after some strong streaming performances. Search Party will have run three entire seasons on HBO Max by the time the series concludes.

Alia Shawkat stars in Search Party, a show originally about a group of friends who go searching for a missing college acquaintance. Things have only gotten darker and stranger since that original story. In the final season, Shawkat’s Dory will be getting into business with a tech billionaire — played by Jeff Goldblum — after surviving a near-death experience. 

The Search Party cast includes Meredith Hagner, John Early, and John Reynolds. This new season will be welcoming a couple of recognizable faces to the ensemble, including Goldblum, Kathy Griffin, and John Waters. Other Season 5 cast members include Aparna Nancherla, Angela Trimbur, Grace Kuhlenschmidt, Greta Titelman, Joe Castle Baker, Larry Owens, Michelle Badillo, Jeffrey Self, and Clare McNulty.

Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers serve as showrunners for Search Party, and they executive produce the series alongside Michael Showalter, Lilly Burns, and Tony Hernandez. 

“[The ending] definitely the hardest ending of any of ours to figure out,” Rogers told Variety earlier this year. “We are leaving off on a very, ‘Oh my god, what does this mean?’ energy, but we talked a lot about enlightenment. We pitched the title card to be white this season to reflect that feeling. We tossed around a lot of different ideas about Dory having an epiphany, and it just so happened that in also thinking about her dying at the end of the season we also found a way to mix those two notions together. Possibly in death is the only way that you can integrate all aspects of your psyche in this very definitive, archetypal way. It was a new way to say that she had fully self-actualized.”

Search Party Season 5 will arrive on HBO Max on January 7, 2022.