The Pessimism Of ‘Party Down’ Season 3 Plays Particularly Well In These ‘Ted Lasso’ Times

The sitcom needs failure like the fish needs water. Nobody wants to spend untold hours hanging out with people who are good at everything, their perfection anathema to both comedy and its counterpoint of drama, resulting in the kind of frictionless unreality seen on Entourage. The underdog archetype agrees with the mechanisms of the small-screen half-hour, which depend on the ability to reset back to square one with each week for potentially infinite season-to-season longevity. Cheers falls apart if the gang doesn’t convene at the bar, so each character’s Sisyphean attempt to break out of their own status quo must necessarily deposit them where they started. (Except Diane, but that’s its own whole thing.) People can change and grow, but their circumstances can’t; this assurance gives the sitcom its comforting consistency and familiarity along with an undercurrent of futility. The show set at the watering hole where everybody knows your name in part because these alcoholics have nowhere else to go understood this better than most.

Party Down invites the failure to seep into its bones, immersing itself in defeated frustration until this outlook hardens into an all-encompassing way of life. By the late ’00s, the workplace-sitcom format was ready to be subsumed by the gig economy, where the disappointment could be hardwired into a premise no one involved wants to be part of. For two well-reviewed yet little-seen seasons in 2009 and 2010 — and now a long-awaited revival on Starz, the irony of having turned into a comeback-kid cult favorite not lost on the hapless show that once drew a whopping 13,000 viewers for its finale — the series followed the travails of an LA cater-waiter company staffed by wannabes waiting to get their foot in the industry door. There’s no single organizing hangout setting, each installment playing out over the course of an event the crew is working, so the unglamorous fringe of show business becomes their home base of stymied plans. The struggling Hollywood outsiders view paying the bills by slinging hors d’oeuvres as a dignity-shredding stopover on the path to the big break that’s eternally just out of reach. So long as they mentally classify themselves as artists instead of servers, their drudgery can safely remain a temporary job, not a person-defining career.

“At a time when kindness and sincerity have taken hold of the sitcom standard-bearers, the sober pessimism of Party Down —in which work sucks, life sucks, most people suck, but none of it sucks quite so bad as the total, numbing nothingness of apathy — returns as a bold tonic.”

They’re all marking time, the troubling question being how long a person can do that before letting go of a dream that isn’t going to happen. And as it turns out in the new episodes rejoining the cast a decade-plus later, this gnawing inner quandary doesn’t get any easier to live with after a person hits forty.

The unimpeachable original seasons gathered a collection of wretches coming in slightly below the bottom of the Z-list, each taking their turn as a plaything of the cruel god that decides who makes it and who doesn’t. Comedienne Casey (Lizzy Caplan, the lone member of the ensemble not back for the third season, her absence due to shooting Fleishman Is in Trouble, cheekily alluded to with a throwaway joke) blows her shot at a Comedy Central pilot, then gets cut out of a Judd Apatow movie. Prettyboy Kyle (Ryan Hansen) books a BASE-jumping action film that gets released straight-to-video exclusively in Asian markets under the title Jumping Boy. Hard sci-fi purist Roman (Martin Starr) has to watch in horror as his former writing partner inks a lucrative studio contract. Most pathetic of all is team leader Ron Donald (Ken Marino), his aspirations limited to managing a Soup R’ Crackers franchise. Because their misfortune is so often their own doing, and because they’re at their best when at their lowest, the foundation of depressed bitterness can peacefully coexist with well-made sitcom farce.

Our man is Gen X poster boy Henry (Adam Scott), a washed-up actor haunted by his beer-commercial catchphrase who believes he’s beaten the universe by abandoning all ambition. As he repeatedly flirts with the idea of giving his craft another go, he comes to embody the vulnerable sentiment at the heart of a deeply cynical exercise in constant humiliation: as painful as it might be, we have no choice but to make an effort, the other options too bleak to accept. Everywhere he goes, he encounters grim warnings of a future without purpose. A neutered suburban dad strips naked at his neighborhood homeowners’ association party just to feel something; a divorcé throws an orgy that spirals into a tantrum of self-pity; a porno awards afterparty pivots into a drug-addled contemplation of the void. 

We all need to do something with ourselves, at least for money if not for reasons of fulfillment. It’s mostly that first one getting everyone back together for this improbable reunion, which sees an alimony-strapped Henry resuming his bartender post as a second job and a post-cancelation Kyle (in his defense, he didn’t realize the song he wrote had such palpable Nazi undertones!) unable to get an audition. Everyone looks well-preserved enough for us to tell that they’re more successful actors than they’re pretending to be, but they’re not impervious to the passage of time. Henry, in particular, wears his normal haggard expression with a little more gravity than he used to, and his generational markers now set him apart from a junior faction of his cohort. The core cast has been diversified with a pair of younger newcomers; Zoë Chao, in particular, clutch as a self-serious chef with pretensions of her own virtuosity, outraged that she has to squander her vision on shrimp puffs. It’s a novel angle for a show that’s studiously avoided any romantic view of high art, its sights set on basic sufficiency. Her delight at her creation of “spinahsh,” an item that embodies the concept of food yet is not actual food, makes for one of the new episodes’ finest running gags.

But the most vital addition is Tyrel Jackson Williams as resident twentysomething Sackson, a Gen Z clout chaser trying to dance his way to TikTok virality. With an admirably unabashed pride, the show bares an open contempt for the micro-video platform as a sign of how eroded the field of entertainment has become. Sackson has an impassioned exchange with a cameoing Constance (Jane Lynch) about the tragedies and triumphs of showbiz, until he specifies the muse he’s following as “content.” She then advises him to give up on “internet videos with your telephone,” saying, “I thought you were talking about a real dream, like actor or something.” The show resents TikTok first and foremost for being dumb and lame, but the prevalence of management-mandated social media engagement also contributes to the wider institutional degradation of the acting profession. Blink and you’ll miss an offhanded line about how streaming contracts screw actors out of the money they once earned through televised syndication. It’s generally difficult to feel bad for actors, since they’re so good-looking, but it’s gotten harder out there.

Starz declined to screen the final episode for critics, which leaves the penultimate’s cliffhanger unresolved, with both Henry and Roman on the brink of their latest chance at the big time. Of course there’s only one place where they can end up, the laws of comic physics pointing them toward yet another embarrassment. At a time when kindness and sincerity have taken hold of the sitcom standard-bearers, the sober pessimism of Party Down —in which work sucks, life sucks, most people suck, but none of it sucks quite so bad as the total, numbing nothingness of apathy — returns as a bold tonic. These scant scraps of hope mean more when they’re hard-won, and the exhortation to try strikes a credible note only coming from someone well-acquainted with existential misery. They say working minimum wage builds character, though it would be more accurate to say it erodes the will to live. With every portobello slider comes a barb through the heart, and with it, a life-and-death challenge to shoot higher.

Party Down Seasons 1 and 2 are currently available to stream on Starz, while Party Down Season 3 is set to premiere on Friday, February 24.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.