Finally, a third season of the “Less Than Zero” of aughts cater-waiter comedies
No real spoilers ahead, mostly contextual stuff.
I adore the cult Starz workplace comedy “Party Down,” which returned today for a third season after a lengthy hiatus — and I’m haunted by it.
As a portrait of young hopefuls on the verge of aging out of their youths and hopes, the first two seasons got a very specific temperament of late-aughts L.A. so very granularly right: creative and/or talented people whose big dreams turned into mediocre dreams and subsequently turned into inspirational platitudes and horseshit about “hard work,” plus just the increasing desperation and passive-aggressive self-delusion re same. (HBO’s “Barry” captures the temperament well too, but in a different way from the original 2009–10 “Party Down” run, lacking the specific emotional urgency of gig workers scrambling to hold their shit together after a cataclysmic economic crash.) Some of the rock-bottom scenes of Party Down catering team leader Ron Donald (Ken Marino) in the throes of his alcoholism and general brokenness, amid the lavish poolside fêtes of the thirty-mile zone, feel like Robert Downey Jr flopsweating through “Less Than Zero.” But somehow, it is a comedy, and it’s howlingly funny.
Season 3’s first episode, so far the only one available, promises more in this vein, with (concurrent with “Barry”) the Trump presidency and Covid-19 to give everyone that extra patina of psychic frazzle. The episode is at its best when it’s doing what it did before — riding the dopamine surges of the brink of success and the deep plunges of despair as life makes other plans in your face. There are unanswered, unanswerable questions of why, excursions into bitterness.
And for balance there’s the cynical but relatively unrufflable proxy-for-the-audience Henry Pollard (Adam Scott), who’s taking it as it comes, being water, letting the other characters’ chaos unfold around him. It’s great to see him back and rolling his eyes at the same bullshit as before.
Where Season 3 falters is in taking the bait to stay contemporary, riffing on TikTok “content” kiddies, the exhausting ubiquity of superhero franchises, even the now quite dated craze for molecular gastronomy. The running bit about cancel culture here is actually funny because it leans into the business of crisis management, and also because the supposed offending material is a callback to an older bit that is GREAT satire, a comedy-of-errors double entendre that’s both dumbass-cute and legit Mel Brooks–level clever gag writing.
So yes, please, more “Party Down.” Especially if it means giving Jane Lynch free rein to be an utter galaxy-brain weirdo. Especially if it means more of Megan Mullally’s character gushing over her stage-kid daughter Escapade. Even if it means Ryan Hansen’s character has new hair now.
