My favourite series of the year so far – and yes, I know that it’s only April – doesn’t feature hideous mushroom-headed zombies staggering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It doesn’t revolve around the Roy dynasty’s endless psychodramas (though in fairness, we are only two episodes into that one). And it doesn’t feature Catherine Cawood side-eyeing a series of interchangeable, patronising male police officers.
No, all these shows are terrific, but my favourite series of the year so far is a micro-budget US comedy about a bunch of failed actors stuck (barely) working for a shambolic catering firm – a show that was last on TV 13 years ago and that I assumed would never, ever return: Party Down.
Some cancellations seem premature, if not completely unfair. But when Party Down was axed in 2010, it was a cancellation that even its star Adam Scott has described as “deserved”. The show’s finale attracted an audience of 74,000 people, basically a statistical blip in a country of 330-odd million.
So it was less a feeling of surprise and more one of complete bafflement for many when Party Down returned this year for an extremely belated third series on Starz in the US and Lionsgate+ in the UK*. After all, even if the show had managed to attract any viewers the first time around, wrangling the cast back together after more than a decade is a major feat, with some of its stars having moved on to much bigger things: Scott is currently tearing it up in Severance; his co-lead Lizzy Caplan is the best thing about Fleishman is in Trouble; Jane Lynch and Megan Mullally – while not quite at their respective Glee and Will & Grace levels of stardom – remain very in-demand funny people.
It’s impressive enough that Party Down has returned with its cast intact (minus Caplan who, regrettably, was tied up filming another series), but for it to actually be good is another thing altogether. From Veronica Mars to The X-Files, TV history is replete with underwhelming returns, from shows struggling to find anything new to say with an old format, or those lazily cashing in on residual affection for their original series.
There’s certainly plenty of affection for Party Down, which seemed to quietly build an army of fans in the years after it was cancelled. But, crucially, the show does manage to find something new and interesting to say. Like Twin Peaks: The Return, another rare reboot that worked, Party Down weaponises the fact that so much time has passed since the original series, that the cast is older and slightly more crinkled around the forehead.
The show’s first two series were bursting with a sense of desperation and ennui around the potential of being stuck in a dour, dead-end job for good. But while the ennui is still very much there in this new series, there’s now almost an acceptance among the group of their lot – still catering school proms, minor celeb birthdays, the odd accidentally booked white nationalist convention. Some, like Scott’s likable loser Henry, who is now a school teacher, have abandoned acting altogether. Some are grimly plugging on, like airhead bro Kyle (Ryan Hansen). And some have lucked out, like Lynch’s dopey spiritualist Constance, now a widow and heiress to a vast fortune. In the middle of it, still frantically grafting away, is Ken Marino’s hapless boss Ronald Wayne “Ron” Donald, one of the most gloriously pathetic characters in all of TV. Watching these characters click into their old rhythms, only with a decade’s worth of life lived in between, is a rare pleasure.
Cannily, Party Down has shuffled the pack a little too. There’s two recruits to the catering company – Sackson, who rather than wanting to be an actor has his eye on the content creator market, and Lucy, a food artist whose creations seem to make those who eat them either incredibly morose or nauseous. And Jennifer Garner –playing a successful film producer stuck in an existential funk, has slotted into the Caplan role of Henry’s love interest – without rehashing the latter’s snarky performance.
The show is as funny as ever – Marino is surely one of the most underrated physical comedians around, and there’s an episode where the crew take mushrooms during a job that had me roaring – but is ever so slightly less savagely cruel to its characters than before (though an episode where Ron gets food poisoning in the middle of a job definitely doesn’t hold back). There’s something mellower and looser about the new Party Down: it’s a returning show that revels in the fact it’s returning at all. Sometimes the best shows are the ones you didn’t see coming.
* Yes, I know, I know yet another streaming service to sign up for. But Lionsgate+ offers a seven-day free trial, so enough time to whiz through all 26 of Party Down’s 30-minute long episodes and have time spare to watch the brilliant Station Eleven.
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